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In this connexion might be adduced the utterance of Socrates 1 which
suggests that if we were all to bring our misfortunes into a common store,
so that each person should receive an equal share in the distribution, the
majority would be glad to take up their own and depart.
The poet Antimachus, also, employed a similar method. For after the death of
his wife, Lyde, whom he loved very dearly, he composed, as a consolation for
his grief, the elegy called Lyde, in which he enumerated the misfortunes of
the heroes, and thus made his own grief less by means of others' ills. So it
is clear that he who tries to console a person in grief, and demonstrates
that the calamity is one which is common to many, and less than the
calamities which have befallen others, changes the opinion of the one in
grief and gives him a similar conviction— that his calamity is
really less than he supposed it to be.
1 Not original with Socrates, cf. Herodotus, vii. 152; attributed to Solon by Valerius Maximus, vii. 2, ext. 2.
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1928. 2.
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