LIX
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I know quite well what you have long been anxious to say and what you demand. I had rather, you say, get rid of fear of thunderbolts than learn all about them. So you may reserve for others your instruction regarding their origin. Let me be delivered from fear of them rather than be informed of their nature. Well, I will follow your invitation, for I quite allow that some moral should be attached to all studies and all discourse. As we dive into the secrets of nature and treat of things in the heavens, the soul must be delivered from its errors and from time to time reassured. Even the learned who devote themselves exclusively to this pursuit require such reassurance; not in order to escape the arrows of fortune, for her missiles are hurled on us from every side, but in order to bear them with resolution and constancy. Unvanquished we may be, unassailed we cannot be, though meantime the hope sometimes insinuates itself that even this is possible. How? you exclaim. Despise death and then everything that leads to death is despised, be it war or shipwreck, or the jaws of wild beasts, or the weight of roofs rushing down with sudden fall. What more can they do than part the body from the soul? And this parting no care can shun, no good fortune can remove, no power can prevent. Other features in human lot are variously assigned; to death’s call all are alike subject. Whether heaven is propitious or wrathful, die we must.
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Let courage be derived from our very despair. The most cowardly of animals which nature has created for flight, if they find no way of escape open to them, show fight with their unwarlike body. In fact, no foe is more deadly than one into whom a tight corner has put courage. Far more violent resistance is offered to death through necessity than through valour. A desperate soul shows as much daring as a courageous, probably more. Let us assume that, so far as concerns death, we are given over to it; and so we are. The fact is so, Lucilius; we are all destined to death. All this nation that you see, all the people you can anywhere suppose to exist, will some day soon be recalled by nature to the grave. There is no question of the fact, only of the day. Sooner or later we must all go to the one place. Well, then, does not he seem to you the most fearful and silliest of men who by great entreaty seeks to delay death? Would you not despise a man who was set in a company of those appointed to death if he asked by way of favour to be allowed to be the last to lay his head upon the block? We do the same in setting such store upon a little delay in the time of death. Capital punishment is the sentence on all mankind, and the sentence is most just. We possess what is wont to be regarded as the greatest consolation that those sentenced to the extreme penalty could enjoy; the circumstances of all being the same, our fate is the same. If handed over by a judge or magistrate to execution, we should follow and render obedience to our executioner; what difference does it make whether it is by order of another or of our own accord that we go to death?
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How foolish you must be, how forgetful of your feebleness if you are afraid of death every time it thunders! Does your abiding safety really depend on this? Will life be secure if you escape the lightning? You will be a victim of the sword, of a stone, of a fever. The lightning is not the most serious of dangers, it is only the most conspicuous. Your fate, I should think, would not be a bad one if the inconceivable rapidity of your death prevented any sense of it, if your death was the occasion of sacrificial ceremonies, if even when you breathe your last, you are not quite a superfluity, but remain as a sign of some great event. Your fate is surely not bad if you are buried along with the bolt of lightning. And yet you are in panic at a crash in the sky, you tremble at the sound of a hollow cloud; as often as there is a flash you are ready to give up the ghost. Well then, is it in your judgment more creditable to die of sheer chicken-heartedness than to be killed by lightning? Rather, say I, confront all the more resolutely the threats of the heavens, and when the universal world is in flames around you, consider that in such a mighty mass you have nothing to lose. But if you can bring yourself to believe that that wreck of heaven, that conflict of the stormy winds, is aimed at you, if it is on your account that the clouds are piled up and collide and roar, if it is for your destruction that such a mass of fire is scattered abroad, then you may surely regard it as some consolation that your death has cost so dear! But there will then be no room for such a reflection. The fate of one struck by lightning removes all fear. Among other advantages it includes this, that it anticipates your expectation; no man ever was afraid of lightning except one who had escaped it.