[76] Seneca, de Brevitate Vitæ, cap. XX.
CHAPTER XVII
'THE END'
It is easy to conceive circumstances not widely different from those of actual life that would, if not altogether, at least very largely, take from death the gloom that commonly surrounds it. If all the members of the human race died either before two or after seventy; if death was in all cases the swift and painless thing that it is with many; and if the old man always left behind him children to perpetuate his name, his memory, and his thoughts, Death, though it might still seem a sad thing, would certainly not excite the feelings it now so often produces. Of all the events that befall us, it is that which owes most of its horror not to itself, but to its accessories, its associations, and to the imaginations that cluster around it. 'Death,' indeed, as a great stoical moralist said, 'is the only evil that can never touch us. When we are, death is not. When death comes, we are not.'
The composition of treatises of consolation intended to accustom men to contemplate death without terror was one of the favourite exercises of the philosophers in the Augustan and in the subsequent periods of Pagan Rome. The chapter which Cicero has devoted to this subject in his treatise on old age is a beautiful example of how it appeared to a virtuous pagan, who believed in a future life which would bring him into communion with those whom he had loved and lost on earth, but who at the same time recognised this only as a probability, not a certainty. "Death," he said, 'is an event either utterly to be disregarded if it extinguish the soul's existence, or much to be wished if it convey her to some region where she shall continue to exist for ever. One of these two consequences must necessarily follow the disunion of soul and body; there is no other possible alternative. What then have I to fear if after death I shall either not be miserable or shall certainly be happy?'
Vague notions, however, of a dim, twilight, shadowy world where the ghosts of the dead lived a faint and joyless existence, and whence they sometimes returned to haunt the living in their dreams, were widely spread through the popular imaginations, and it was as the extinction of all superstitious fears that the school of Lucretius and Pliny welcomed the belief that all things ended with death—'Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.' Nor is it by any means certain that even in the school of Plato the thought of another life had a great and operative influence on minds and characters. Death was chiefly represented as rest; as the close of a banquet; as the universal law of nature which befalls all living beings, though the immense majority encounter it at an earlier period than man. It was thought of simply as sleep—dreamless, undisturbed sleep—the final release from all the sorrows, sufferings, anxieties, labours, and longings of life.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life