De mortuis nihil nisi bonum phrase coined by Chilon of Sparta (ca. 600 BC).
Adam Linsay Gordon wrote this mortuary phrase in his poem “Sunlight on the Sea” (The Philosophy of a Feast) .
We eat and drink, we come and go,
(The sunlight dies upon the open sea.)
I speak in riddles. Is it so?
My riddles need not mar your glee;
For I will neither bid you share
My thoughts, nor will I bid you shun,
Though I should see in yonder chair
Th’ Egyptian’s muffled skeleton.
One toast with me, your glasses fill,
Aye, fill them level with the brim,
De mortuis, nisi bonum, nil!
The lights are growing dim.
Louise Elisabeth Gluck also wrote the mortuary phrase in her poem The Open Grave.
My mother made my need,
my father my conscience.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Therefore it will cost me
bitterly to lie,
to prostrate myself
at the edge of a grave.
I say to the earth
“be kind to my mother,
now and later.
Save, with your coldness,
the beauty we all envied.”
I became an old woman.
I welcomed the dark
I used so to fear.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
And Sigmund Freud wrote in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death in the second part of the essay, Our Attitude Towards Death.
We assume a special attitude towards the dead, something almost like admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult feat.
We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs he may have done, and issue the command, De mortuis nil nisi bene("Of the dead, nothing [spoken] unless well (truthfully)") : we act as if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe only what is to his advantage on the tombstone.
This consideration for the dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth, and, to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the living.
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