Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.8-9

But let us observe Hercules himself, who was subdued by pain at the very time when he was on the point of attaining immortality by death. 

What words does Sophocles here put in his mouth, in his Trachiniae? who, when Deianira had put upon him a tunic dyed in the centaur’s blood, and it stuck to his entrails, says, 
 
“What tortures I endure no words can tell,
Far greater these, than those which erst befell
From the dire terror of thy consort, Jove—
E’en stern Eurystheus’ dire command above;
This of thy daughter, Oeneus, is the fruit,
Beguiling me with her envenom’d suit,
Whose close embrace doth on my entrails prey,
Consuming life; my lungs forbid to play;
The blood forsakes my veins; my manly heart
Forgets to beat; enervated, each part
Neglects its office, while my fatal doom
Proceeds ignobly from the weaver’s loom.
The hand of foe ne’er hurt me, nor the fierce
Giant issuing from his parent earth.
Ne’er could the Centaur such a blow enforce,
No barbarous foe, nor all the Grecian force;
This arm no savage people could withstand,
Whose realms I traversed to reform the land.
Thus, though I ever bore a manly heart,
I fall a victim to a woman’s art.
 
“Assist, my son, if thou that name dost hear,
My groans preferring to thy mother’s tear:
Convey her here, if, in thy pious heart,
Thy mother shares not an unequal part:
Proceed, be bold, thy father’s fate bemoan,
Nations will join, you will not weep alone.
Oh, what a sight is this same briny source,
Unknown before, through all my labors’ course!
That virtue, which could brave each toil but late,
With woman’s weakness now bewails its fate.
Approach, my son; behold thy father laid,
A wither’d carcass that implores thy aid;
Let all behold: and thou, imperious Jove,
On me direct thy lightning from above:
Now all its force the poison doth assume,
And my burnt entrails with its flame consume.
Crestfallen, unembraced, I now let fall
Listless, those hands that lately conquer’d all;
When the Nemaean lion own’d their force,
And he indignant fell a breathless corse;
The serpent slew, of the Lernean lake,
As did the Hydra of its force partake:
By this, too, fell the Erymanthian boar:
E’en Cerberus did his weak strength deplore.
This sinewy arm did overcome with ease
That dragon, guardian of the Golden Fleece.
My many conquests let some others trace;
It’s mine to say, I never knew disgrace.”
 
Can we then, despise pain, when we see Hercules himself giving vent to his expressions of agony with such impatience? 

—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.8-9 
 
I believe my first direct exposure to the story of Hercules’ death came from a reading in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I not only found it unpleasant, but the images were stuck in my dreams for some time. 
 
I would wake up in a panic from a picture of my skin and muscles being pulled from the bones of my arm as I was trying to roll up the sleeve of my shirt, and to this day, when my mental state is especially weak, I will sometimes still have nightmares where I can look through a gaping hole in my hand. 
 
Beyond my dread of emotional loss, which is perhaps best reserved for the discussion in the next book of the Tusculan Disputations, I am also notably squeamish about the pain that comes from bits and pieces of my body being destroyed. 
 
I once had my thumb crushed in a heavy steel door, and I recall how the intense physical agony of it was not nearly as terrifying as the sight of a part of me as flat as a pancake, dangling precariously from the rest of my hand.
 
If I imagine this sort of damage being inflicted all over me, I feel nauseous and weak at the knees. How could anyone possible endure it? How much of the pain is in the event itself, and how much has been imposed by my own fantasies? 
 
It is fitting that Cicero chose this gruesome account to work with, for it removes any illusions about cheerfully skipping along while chunks of flesh are being ripped out. It may remain to be established whether pain can be considered an evil, though there is little denying that it hurts, and there should be no tiptoeing around it. 
 
I won’t venture to speak about what Epicurus intended, and instead limit myself to what goes on in my own head. If I were going to pick pleasure and pain as the axis of benefit and harm, I would be inclined to try diminishing the power of pain, since otherwise at least half of my life would be miserable. 
 
The other option, of course, is to assess pleasure and pain by some higher standard, which would make them more manageable, without presenting them as something common sense clearly informs me they’re not. You may tell me that pain can mean something, but please don’t tell me to brush it aside—it’s too real for that. 
 
While Ovid’s vivid description gave me the chills, it served me well to hear of Hercules’ suffering in a book about old things constantly becoming new. As the name suggests, the Metamorphoses are tales about transformations, and how all of Nature moves forward through change. It is never enough to ask what happened, and always necessary to discover what grew from it. 
 
While the human half of Hercules burned away into ash, his divine half returned to its source, no longer hindered by the limitations of mortality. To know this does not negate the suffering, but it does offer something of the gain that might come through the pain. 

—Reflection written in 7/1996 

IMAGE: Samuel F.B. Morse, Dying Hercules (c. 1812)