De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum

The Latin phrase De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (“Of the dead, nothing unless good”), indicates that it is socially inappropriate to speak ill of the dead. As a mortuary aphorism, De mortuis. . . . derives from the Latin sentence De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est (“Of the dead nothing but good is to be said”), which also is abbreviated as Nil nisi bonum. In English usage, freer translations are the aphoristic phrases “Speak no ill of the dead”, “Of the dead, speak no evil”, and “Do not speak ill of the dead”.

  • Chilon of Sparta coined the phrase De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. (ca. 600 BC)

  • The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius (1594 edition)

The first recorded use of the phrase of mortuary respect, dates from the 4th century, published in the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (ca. AD 300), by Diogenes Laërtius (bk. 1, ch. 70), wherein the Greek aphorism τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν (Don’t badmouth a dead man) is attributed to Chilon of Sparta (ca. 600 BC), one of the Seven Sages of Greece. In the 15th century, during the Italian Renaissance, the humanist monk Ambrogio Traversari translated Diogenes’s Greek book into Latin, as Laertii Diogenis vitae et sententiae eorum qui in philosophia probati fuerunt (1433), and so popularized De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, the Latin aphorism advising respect for the dead.

Famous quotes containing the word nil:

    Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)