(c) and as the Egyptians, after their festivals, caused a great image of death to be exhibited to the guests by one who cried: “Drink and enjoy yourselves, for when dead you will be like this,”[1] (a) so I have fallen into the habit of having death constantly, not in my mind alone, but on my lips; and there is nothing of which I enquire so eagerly as of the deaths of men, what words they said, what their expression was, and their bearing; nor are there any passages in histories which I read so carefully. (c) This appears by my cramming these pages with examples; and that I have a special fondness for this sort of matter. Were I a maker of books, I should make an annotated record of different deaths.[2] He who should teach men how to die would teach them how to live. Dicearchus[3] made a book with a similar title, but with another and less useful purpose.
(a) I shall be told that the thing itself goes so far beyond one’s idea of it, that the best fencing is at a loss when one reaches that point. Let them say what they will: to think upon it beforehand unquestionably gives one a great advantage;[4] and then, too, is it nothing to go so far as that without emotion and without trembling? Yet more:[5] Nature herself lends us a hand and gives us courage. If it be a sudden and violent death, we have no time to dread it; if it be otherwise, I perceive that, in proportion as I become sick, I feel involuntarily some contempt of life.[6] I find that I have much more difficulty in swallowing the thought of death when I am in health than I have when I am sick, inasmuch as I no longer cling so closely to the pleasures of life, since I begin to lose the habit and enjoyment of them; then I look upon death with a much less terrified vision. This makes me hope that the further I shall draw away from life
- ↑ See Herodotus, II, 78. Cf. p. 114 supra.
- ↑ See such lists in Pliny, Natural History, VII; Valerius Maximus, IX, 12; also Rabelais, IV, 18.
- ↑ A philosophical writer — a pupil of Aristotle. See Cicero, De Off., II, 5.
- ↑ This is an idea that constantly recurs in Seneca’s letters.
- ↑ The editions of 1580—1588 add: Je reconnoy par experience que.
- ↑ Cf. the Essays, “Of Experience” (Book II, chap. 6), and ‘‘Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers” (Book II, chap. 37), near the beginning.
