There’s a stubborn little Latin phrase that pops up in moments of awkward reverence: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Speak only good of the dead. It’s quoted in funeral eulogies, whispered in classrooms, and thrown like a rhetorical cloak over the legacy of public figures who’ve expired, even when those legacies were built atop prisons, propaganda, or piles of bones.
Its roots trace back to Chilon of Sparta, a sage who lived when memory was not digital and death, once delivered, was socially final. The dead, after all, do not respond. That, Chilon reasoned, made criticism of them unfair. Seneca, a Roman Stoic, later refined the idea: don't waste energy castigating those beyond correction. It’s futile, he argued, and resentment is beneath the dignity of a rational mind.
But here's the rub: what if silence itself is the injustice? We now inhabit a historical moment where the dead are never truly gone. Their likenesses are etched into architecture, their policies encoded in institutions, their faces still printed on currency, textbooks, and T-shirts. Their myths are rehearsed in speeches, documentaries, and Twitter threads. To call them “dead” is, in a sense, inaccurate. Many of them still govern in statute, in story, in statue.
So when public figures are assassinated, or merely die in bed after a controversial life, what obligation do we really owe them?
There’s a growing discomfort around criticizing those who were murdered, especially for political reasons. It’s understandable. Violence shocks our moral compass, and we rush to draw bright ethical lines: this person should not have died like that. Which is true. But then, almost reflexively, we soften our posture toward everything else about them; their beliefs, their influence, their power. The murder becomes an unspoken shield against critique.
This is a mistake. Being a public figure is not just a role; it is a wager. It is a conscious decision to make one's life, words, and decisions part of the public record, and therefore, the public debate. Death, violent or not, does not nullify that wager. If anything, it raises the stakes.
When we refrain from evaluating public figures because they are no longer alive, we aren't being virtuous. We are abandoning our responsibility. Because critique is not always about them. It's about us. It’s about the world we continue to build with the materials they left behind.
Seneca’s wisdom, in this light, is more nuanced than its quotation suggests. He didn’t call for silence in the name of kindness. He called for speech to be rational, useful, and just. Venting personal bile about a a dead extremist is unproductive. But rigorously dissecting their decisions and the ideologies that animated them is not only permitted; it's essential.
What happens when we forget that? We end up canonizing flawed or dangerous ideas simply because the person who held them was taken from the world unjustly. We confuse sympathy for the dead with sanctification of their worldview. And that confusion, though often well-intentioned, becomes a form of collective amnesia; one that distorts both history and policy.
To condemn the manner of someone’s death is not to absolve the manner of their life. The two are not logically incompatible. A person can be wrongly killed and rightly critiqued. They can deserve justice for the crime committed against them, while still being responsible for the ideas they promoted.
What we must avoid is the sacralization of the slain. This is particularly urgent in an age where political martyrdom is a potent tool. A death can become a brand. A legacy can metastasize into myth. And a myth, once immune from criticism, becomes an engine of repetition. If we allow murder to halt moral inquiry, we empower the very forces that weaponize it.
We must, then, resist the moral laziness of reverence. It is possible and necessary to both mourn the victim of political violence and scrutinize their beliefs with intellectual honesty. Not out of spite, but out of fidelity to truth. Not out of vengeance, but out of duty to the living.
Public life comes with a permanent echo. If you enter it, you do not get to dictate the terms of your memory. You can hope for generosity, but you cannot demand silence. The archive is relentless. It is digital, distributable, and increasingly democratized. And that is not a threat to dignity. It is a safeguard against forgetting.
So let the maxim rest. Speak no ill of the dead if that silence serves reflection. But speak with clarity and courage when history demands it. Not because they are dead, but because we are not.
