"Well," said Philip, "various things he fancies, and I fancy so too. Considering that all men must die, and can die only once, and that it has become somehow, I suppose, by practice and decree, as natural as to be born, and that we have been doing nothing for thousands of years but making way for each other in that manner, it would be an error to look upon death as the greatest evil. Why, man, I should go mad if that which none can avoid was the greatest evil that any can incur."
"Edepol!" exclaimed the slave again; "you are apparently right. Yet what can be conceived worse than death? You mean immense pain, long continuing; in which case a wise man would put an end to himself."
"Wise!" returned Philip; "but it would be useless to reason with such as you. You should have heard, as I have heard him, Dionysius the Athenian upon this topic. When you make such reflections, is it your big toe, for example, or your belly, or your elbow, or any part of your body, that makes them? You may put an end to your body, and we know what becomes of it. When it is no longer fit, as the young Athenian says, to be the house of that which thinks and reflects within it, this last departs; for the body, once dead, ceases to think or reflect, and as soon as the thinker does thus depart, the body rots.
"But that other thing which kept the body from rotting, that other thing which thinks and reflects, and which is conscious that it is always the same, that it always has been itself—that other thing which knows its own unalterable identity through all the changes of the body, from squalling childhood to stiff-kneed age—how can that other thing, which may easily depart out of the body and leave it to perish, depart out of itself? A thing may leave another thing; but how can any thing be left by itself? When this thing, says Dionysius, goes away from the body, the body always dies. It was, therefore, the body's life. But out of its own self this life cannot go (can any thing go out of itself?) and if it goes out of the body unbidden, what will it say to him who had put it therein when he asks, Sentinel, why have you quitted your post? Servant, why have you left your charge? What brings you hither? I am angry with you! What will this always conscious, always identical thing, then reply?"
"You frighten me," said Lygdus. "What, then, can be more feared by a reasonable man than death?"
"My young master, for example," replied Philip, "so long, be it always understood, as he is not his own murderer, would prefer to die in honor than to live in shame. His father, the brave Roman tribune, used to say to him as a boy, that a disgraced life was worse than a useless life, and a useless life worse than a noble death. But who comes hither?"
The interesting little child Caius Caligula, and the boy Herod Agrippa, entered the stable as Philip spoke.
"Oh! there is the big wild horse," cried the sweet infant, who had only just arrived at the use of his reason; "but where is the young man that is to be eaten? I want to tell him what will become of him, and then to watch his face."
"He is, I see, even, now coming back," said Philip sternly. He stood up as he spoke, and an instant afterward Paulus, who was attended by the slave Claudius, bearing a basket of provisions for old Philip, crossed the threshold.