How to Conduct Ourselves towards Our Parents

Hierocles · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

From the “Ethical Fragments of Hierocles” in Political fragments of Archytas, Charondas, Zaleucus, and other Ancient Pythagoreans, preserved by Stobæus, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor in 1822, pages 83–89. Its companion piece in this series, “Hierocles exalts wedlock,” comes from pages 95–105 of the same volume.

Having dealt with the gods and with one's country, Hierocles asks what subject deserves to come next if not our parents, and answers his own question by calling them certain secondary and terrestrial gods — more to be honoured by us, on account of their proximity, than the gods themselves. The measure of gratitude he sets is a perpetual and unremitting readiness to repay the benefits received, on the understanding that whatever is performed for their sake will fall far short of what they deserve. He then offers the argument that our deeds are in a sense theirs, since they produced the person by whom the deeds are done: as the works of Phidias and other artists would still be called the artists' works even if those works themselves produced something further, so our performances may justly be called the deeds of our parents. The practical rule he draws from this is to keep one sentence perpetually at hand — that our parents are to be considered the images of the gods, and as domestic gods, benefactors, kindred, creditors, lords and most stable friends; images more stable than the power of art can effect, guardian gods of the house who live with us, and who bestow not only what we possess but the means of possessing it.

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