him! You may see by this that an orator may do anything; but nobody
would approve of such license if it were not that we have an idea
innate in our minds that every good man ought to lament the loss of a
relation as bitterly as possible. And it is owing to this that some
men, when in sorrow, betake themselves to deserts, as Homer says of
Bellerophon:

Distracted in his mind,
Forsook by heaven, forsaking human kind,
Wide o'er the Aleïan field he chose to stray,
A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way![43]

And thus Niobe is feigned to have been turned into stone, from her
never speaking, I suppose, in her grief. But they imagine Hecuba to
have been converted into a bitch, from her rage and bitterness of mind.
There are others who love to converse with solitude itself when in
grief, as the nurse in Ennius,

Fain would I to the heavens find earth relate
Medea's ceaseless woes and cruel fate.[44]

XXVII. Now all these things are done in grief, from a persuasion of
their truth and propriety and necessity; and it is plain that those who
behave thus do so from a conviction of its being their duty; for should
these mourners by chance drop their grief, and either act or speak for
a moment in a more calm or cheerful manner, they presently check
themselves and return to their lamentations again, and blame themselves
for having been guilty of any intermissions from their grief; and
parents and masters generally correct children not by words only, but
by blows, if they show any levity by either word or deed when the