Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
no judgment seat before which he must appear, and that Death is
such utter freedom that, he need fear no more despots. All that is
a phantasy of the poets, who have terrified us without a cause.
Death is a release from and an end of all pains: beyond it our
sufferings cannot extend: it restores us to the peaceful rest in
which we lay before we were born. If any one pities the dead, he
ought also to pity those who have not been born. Death is neither
a good nor a bad thing, for that alone which is something can be a
good or a bad thing: but that which is nothing, and reduces all
things to nothing, does not hand us over to either fortune, because
good and bad require some material to work upon. Fortune cannot
take hold of that which Nature has let go, nor can a man be unhappy
if he is nothing. Your son has passed beyond the border of the {191}
country where men are forced to labour; he has reached deep and
everlasting peace. He feels no fear of want, no anxiety about his
riches, no stings of lust that tears the heart in guise of pleasure:
he knows no envy of another’s prosperity, he is not crushed by the
weight of his own; even his chaste ears are not wounded by any
ribaldry: he is menaced by no disaster, either to his country or
to himself. He does not hang, full of anxiety, upon the issue of
events, to reap even greater uncertainty as his reward: he has at
last taken up a position from which nothing can dislodge him, where
nothing can make him afraid.
XX. O how little do men understand their own misery, that they do
not praise and look forward to death as the best discovery of Nature,
whether because it hedges in happiness, or because it drives away
misery: because it puts an end to the sated weariness of old age,
cuts down youth in its bloom while still full of hope of better
things, or calls home childhood before the harsher stages of life
are reached: it is the end of all men, a relief to many, a desire
to some, and it treats none so well as those to whom it comes before
they call for it. Death frees the slave though his master wills it
not, it lightens the captive’s chains: it leads out of prison those
whom headstrong power has forbidden to quit it: it points out to
exiles, whose minds and eyes are ever turned towards their own
country, that it makes no difference under what people’s soil one
lies. When Fortune has unjustly divided the common stock, and has
given over one man to another, though they were born with equal
rights. Death makes them all equal. After Death no one acts any
more at another’s bidding: in death no man suffers any more from
the sense of his low position. It is open to all: it was what your
father, Marcia, longed for: it is this, I say, that renders it no
misery to be born, which enables me to face the threatenings of
misfortune without quailing, and to keep {192} my mind unharmed and
able to command itself. I have a last appeal. I see before me crosses
not all alike, but differently made by different peoples: some hang
a man head downwards, some force a stick upwards through his groin,
some stretch out his arms on a forked gibbet. I see cords, scourges,
and instruments of torture for each limb and each joint: but I see
Death also. There are bloodthirsty enemies, there are overbearing
fellow-countrymen, but where they are there I see Death also. Slavery
is not grievous if a man can gain his freedom by one step as soon
as he becomes tired of thraldom. Life, it is thanks to Death that
I hold thee so dear. Think how great a blessing is a timely death,
how many have been injured by living longer than they ought. If
sickness had carried off that glory and support of the empire,
Gnaeus Pompeius, at Naples, he would have died the undoubted head
of the Roman people, but as it was, a short extension of time cast
him down from his pinnacle of fame: he beheld his legions slaughtered
before his eyes: and what a sad relic of that battle, in which the
Senate formed the first line, was the survival of the general. He
saw his Egyptian butcher, and offered his body, hallowed by so many
victories, to a guardsman’s sword, although even had he been unhurt,
he would have regretted his safety: for what could have been more
infamous than that a Pompeius should owe his life to the clemency
of a king? If Marcus Cicero had fallen at the time when he avoided
those daggers which Catiline aimed equally at him and at his country,
he might have died as the saviour of the commonwealth which he had
set free: if his death had even followed upon that of his daughter,
he might have died happy. He would not then have seen swords drawn
for the slaughter of Roman citizens, the goods of the murdered
divided among the murderers that men might pay from their own purse
the price of their {193} own blood, the public auction of the
consul’s spoil in the civil war, the public letting out of murder
to be done, brigandage, war, pillage, hosts of Catilines. Would it
not have been a good thing for Marcus Cato if the sea had swallowed
him up when he was returning from Cyprus after sequestrating the
king’s hereditary possessions, even if that very money which he was
bringing to pay the soldiers in the civil war had been lost with
him? He certainly would have been able to boast that no one would
dare to do wrong in the presence of Cato: as it was, the extension
of his life for a very few more years forced one who was born for
personal and political freedom to flee from Caesar and to become
Pompeius’s follower. Premature death therefore did him no evil:
indeed, it put an end to the power of any evil to hurt him.
XXI. “Yet,” say you, “he perished too soon and untimely.” In the
first place, suppose that he had lived to extreme old age: let him
continue alive to the extreme limits of human existence: how much
is it after all? Born for a very brief space of time, we regard
this life as an inn which we are soon to quit that it may be made
ready for the coming guest. Do I speak of our lives, which we know
roll away incredibly fast? Reckon up the centuries of cities: you
will find that even those which boast of their antiquity have not
existed for long. All human works are brief and fleeting; they take
up no part whatever of infinite time. Tried by the standard of the
universe, we regard this earth of ours, with all its cities, nations,
rivers, and sea-board as a mere point: our life occupies less than
a point when compared with all time, the measure of which exceeds
that of the world, for indeed the world is contained many times in
it. Of what importance, then, can it be to lengthen that which,
however much you add to it, will never be much more than nothing?
We can only make our lives long by one expedient, that is, by being
{194} satisfied with their length: you may tell me of long-lived
men, whose length of days has been celebrated by tradition, you may
assign a hundred and ten years apiece to them: yet when you allow
your mind to conceive the idea of eternity, there will be no
difference between the shortest and the longest life, if you compare
the time during which any one has been alive with that during which
he has not been alive. In the next place, when he died his life was
complete: he had lived as long as he needed to live: there was
nothing left for him to accomplish. All men do not grow old at the
same age, nor indeed do all animals: some are wearied out by life
at fourteen years of age, and what is only the first stage of life
with man is their extreme limit of longevity. To each man a varying
length of days has been assigned: no one dies before his time,
because he was not destined to live any longer than he did. Everyone’s
end is fixed, and will always remain where it has been placed:
neither industry nor favour will move it on any further. Believe,
then, that you lost him by advice: he took all that was his own,
“And reached the goal allotted to his life,”
so you need not burden yourself with the thought, “He might have
lived longer.” His life has not been cut short, nor does chance
ever cut short our years: every man receives as much as was promised
to him: the Fates go their own way, and neither add anything nor
take away anything from what they have once promised. Prayers and
endeavours are all in vain: each man will have as much life as his
first day placed to his credit: from the time when he first saw the
light he has entered on the path that leads to death, and is drawing
nearer to his doom: those same years which were added to his youth
were subtracted from his life. We all fall into this mistake of
supposing that it is only old men, already in the decline of life,
who are drawing {195} near to death, whereas our first infancy, our
youth, indeed every time of life leads thither. The Fates ply their
own work: they take from us the consciousness of our death, and,
the better to conceal its approaches, death lurks under the very
names we give to life: infancy changes into boyhood, maturity
swallows up the boy, old age the man; these stages themselves, if
you reckon them properly, are so many losses.
XXII. Do you complain, Marcia, that your son did not live as long
as he might have done? How do you know that it was to his advantage
to live longer? whether his interest was not served by this death?
Whom can you find at the present time whose fortunes are grounded
on such sure foundations that they have nothing to fear in the
future? All human affairs are evanescent and perishable, nor is any
part of our life so frail and liable to accident as that which we
especially enjoy. We ought, therefore, to pray for death when our
fortune is at its best, because so great is the uncertainty and
turmoil in which we live, that we can be sure of nothing but what
is past. Think of your son’s handsome person, which you had guarded
in perfect purity among all the temptations of a voluptuous capital.
Who could have undertaken to keep that clear of all diseases, so
that it might preserve its beauty of form unimpaired even to old
age? Think of the many taints of the mind: for fine dispositions
do not always continue to their life’s end to make good the promise
of their youth, but have often broken down: either extravagance,
all the more shameful for being indulged in late in life, takes
possession of men and makes their well-begun lives end in disgrace,
or they devote their entire thoughts to the eating-house and the
belly, and they become interested in nothing save what they shall
eat and what they shall drink. Add to this conflagrations, falling
houses, shipwrecks, the agonizing operations of surgeons, who cut
{196} pieces of bone out of men’s living bodies, plunge their whole
hands into their entrails, and inflict more than one kind of pain
to effect the cure of shameful diseases. After these comes exile;
your son was not more innocent than Rutilius: imprisonment; he was
not wiser than Socrates: the piercing of one’s breast by a
self-inflicted wound; he was not of holier life than Cato. When you
look at these examples, you will perceive that nature deals very
kindly with those whom she puts speedily in a place of safety because
there awaited them the payment of some such price as this for their
lives. Nothing is so deceptive, nothing is so treacherous as human
life; by Hercules, were it not given to men before they could form
an opinion, no one would take it. Not to be born, therefore, is the
happiest lot of all, and the nearest thing to this, I imagine, is
that we should soon finish our strife here and be restored again
to our former rest. Recall to your mind that time, so painful to
you, during which Sejanus handed over your father as a present to
his client Satrius Secundus: he was angry with him about something
or other which he had said with too great freedom, because he was