Grief

Grief destroys courage;

but grief, even the most subtle, when it falls cannot be borne.

"This great calamity has surely come by the force of fate, or by chance, for the destruction of this dynasty, O charioteer.

Do not let your soul be pressed too hard by grief, whether a sickness lying upon you weighs you down or some other hardship befalls;

to pass even a single day apart from grief and fear and such passions.

But to be enslaved to grief is altogether unreasonable and astonishing.

just as each of those who carry burdens thinks that what he carries is the heaviest.

A dark cloud of sorrow [ akhos] fell upon Laertes as he listened.

When Odysseus saw him so worn, so old and full of sorrow [ penthos], he stood still under a tall pear tree and began to weep.

He was overwhelmed with grief [ penthos] for the death of his son Antinoos, who had been the first man killed by Odysseus, so he said, weeping bitterly, "My friend, this man has done the Achaeans great wrong.

All those things avail for a brief moment, and are not remedies of grief but hindrances;

You returned, not to take pleasure in your son, but to lose the habit of longing for him.

To that point I must turn all my consolation, whence the true force of a mother's grief arises:

“But the longing for one's own is natural.

Next, what is natural does not diminish with delay;

I cannot now reach so hard a grief by indulgence or by gentleness;

For unless reason puts an end to our tears, Fortune will not.

Therefore let us spare ourselves the tears that profit nothing;

and therefore that which must be done so often ought to be done by us with moderation, and, looking back upon how great a store of sorrowful things hangs over us behind, we ought, if not to make an end of tears, at least to keep them in reserve.