Confidence (courage) then ought to be employed against death, and caution against the fear of death. But now we do the contrary, and employ against death the attempt to escape; and to our opinion about it we employ carelessness, rashness and indifference. These things Socrates[1] properly used to call tragic masks; for as to children masks appear terrible and fearful from inexperience, we also are affected in like manner by events (the things which happen in life) for no other reason than children are by masks. For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of knowledge. For when a child knows these things, he is in no way inferior to us. What is death? A tragic mask. Turn it and examine it. See, it does not bite. The poor body must be separated[2] from the spirit either now or later as it was separated from it before. Why then are you troubled, if it be separated now? for if it is not separated now, it will be separated afterwards. Why? That the period of the universe may be completed,[3] for it has need of the present, and of the future, and of the past. What is pain? A mask. Turn it and examine it. The poor flesh is moved roughly, then on the contrary smoothly. If this does not satisfy (please) you, the door is open:[4] if it
- ↑ In the Phaedon, c. 24, or p. 78.
- ↑ It was the opinion of some philosophers that the soul was a portion of the divinity sent down into human bodies.
- ↑ This was a doctrine of Heraclitus and of Zeno. Zeno (Diog. Laert. vii. 137) speaks of God as "in certain periods or revolutions of time exhausting into himself the universal substance (οὐσία) and again generating it out of himself." Antoninus (xi. 1) speaks of the periodical renovation of all things. For man, whose existence is so short, the doctrine of all existing things perishing in the course of time and then being renewed, is of no practical value. The present is enough for most men. But for the few who are able to embrace in thought the past, the present and the future, the contemplation of the perishable nature of all existing things may have a certain value by elevating their minds above the paltry things which others prize above their worth.
- ↑ Sec. i. 9, note 7. Schweighaeuser says that he does not quite see what is the meaning of 'ought to be open'; and he suggests that Epictetus intended to say 'we ought to consider that the door is open for all occasions'; but the occasions, he says, ought to be when things are such that a man can in no way bear them or cannot honourably endure them, and such occasions the wise man considers to be the voico of God giving to him the signal to retire.
