The Latin phraseDe mortuis nihil nisi bonum "Of the dead, nothing but good", abbreviated as Nil nisi bonum, is a mortuaryaphorism, indicating that it is socially inappropriate to speak ill of the dead as they are unable to justify themselves. The full sentence translates to "Of the dead nothing but good is to be said". Freer translations into English are often used as aphorisms, these include: "Speak no ill of the dead", "Of the dead, speak no evil", and "Do not speak ill of the dead". The aphorism is first recorded in Greek, as τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν, attributed to Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, in the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, published in the early 4th century AD. The Latin version dates to the Italian Renaissance, from the translation of Diogenes' Greek by humanist monk Ambrogio Traversari.
After the sudden death of the Bishop's wife, the Archdeacon describes De mortuis as a proverb "founded in humbug" that only need be followed in public and is unable to bring himself to adopt "the namby-pamby every-day decency of speaking well of one of whom he had ever thought ill."
After destroying the villain, Andrew Lumley, the hero, Sir Edward Leithen, speaks De mortuis & c., an abbreviated version of the phrase, about the dead Lumley.
Father Handy thinks of the phrase in reference to millions of people killed by nerve gas. He then subverts the phrase to "de mortuis nil nisi malum" in blaming them for complacently voting in the politicians responsible.
After an unwitting cuckold is accidentally informed of his wife’s infidelities, he plans an opportunistic revenge; the titular phrase, de mortuis, implies the murderous ending of the story.
After the demise of his friend/project - EPICAC, the supercomputer, the protagonist states the phrase in a memoir of someone who has done great for him.
Poetic
In “Sunlight on the Sea”, by Adam Lindsay Gordon, the mortuary phrase is the penultimate line of the eighth, and final, stanza of the poem.
Philosophic
Cinematic
In the war–adventure film Lawrence of Arabia
The phrase is cautiously used at the funeral of T. E. Lawrence, officiated at St Paul's Cathedral; two men, a clergyman and a soldier, Colonel Brighton, are observing a bust of the dead “Lawrence of Arabia”, and commune in silent mourning.
The clergyman asks: “Well, nil nisi bonum. But did he really deserve... a place in here?” Colonel Brighton’s reply is a pregnant silence.
Theatrical
In The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, a character mangles the mortuary phrase.
In Act 1, in an effort at light metaphor, the bourgeois character Ilya Afanasyevich Shamrayev, misquotes the Latin phrase Nil nisi bonum and conflates it with the maximDe gustibusnon est disputandum, which results in the mixed mortuary opinion: De gustibus aut bene, aut nihil.
In Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Mark Antony uses what is possibly a perverted form of the phrase De mortuis nil nisi bonum, when he says:
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones...
