And if they do but imagine they either ask or desire any thing of
them, they are glad when they give it them. Thus Periander burnt his
queen’s attire with her, because he thought she had asked for it and
complained she was a-cold. Nor doth an Aeacus, an Ascalaphus, or an
Acheron much disorder them whom they have often gratified with balls,
shows, and music of every sort. But now all men shrink from that face
of death which carries with it insensibility, oblivion, and extinction
of knowledge, as being dismal, grim, and dark. And they are discomposed
when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone, or he
is no more; and they show great uneasiness when they hear such words as
these:
Go to the wood-clad earth he must,
And there lie shrivelled into dust,
And ne’er more laugh or drink, or hear
The charming sounds of flute or lyre;
and these.
But from our lips the vital spirit fled
Returns no more to wake the silent dead.[153]
27. Wherefore they must needs cut the very throats of them that shall
with Epicurus tell them, We men were born once for all, and we cannot
be born twice, but our not being must last for ever. For this will
bring them to slight their present good as little, or rather indeed as
nothing at all compared with everlastingness, and therefore to let it
pass unenjoyed and to become wholly negligent of virtue and action,
as men disheartened and brought to a contempt of themselves, as being
but as it were of one day’s continuance and uncertain, and born for no
considerable purpose. For insensibility, dissolution, and the conceit
that what hath no sense is nothing to us, do not at all abate the fear
of death, but rather help to confirm it; for this very thing is it that
nature most dreads,—