Dialogues and Letters Read Online Free PDF Page B

and ensured
the continuance of that renown which destiny granted the Scipios
in Africa. It was a great achievement to conquer Carthage, but
    10         a greater one to conquer death. ‘All is well with the general,’ he
said: should a general – and what is more Cato’s general – die
    11         otherwise? I’m not referring you to the history books or assembling
from all past ages the very many who have despised death.
Look at these times of ours whose apathy and affected manners
we complain about: they will still offer you individuals of every
rank, fortune and age who have cut short their sufferings by death.
Trust me, Lucilius, death is so far not to be feared that, thanks
    12         to it, nothing is to be feared. So listen with tranquillity to your
enemy’s threats, and though your good conscience gives you
confidence, since there are many powerful factors outside the
case, you must both hope for the most favourable outcome and
gird yourself to face the most unfavourable one. But this above all
remember: to banish life’s turbulence and see clearly the essence of
everything. You will then realize that there is nothing fearful
    13         there except fear itself. What you see happen with children is true
of us slightly older children too. If they see their own friends
and regular playfellows wearing masks they become frightened of
them. Well, not only people but things must have their masks
stripped off and their true features restored.
    14            Why do you show me swords and flames and a crowd of
executioners clamouring around you? Away with that parade
behind which you lurk to terrify fools: you are death, whom
lately my slave and my handmaid despised. Why display again all
that equipment of whips and racks – the instruments specially
designed to tear apart individual joints, and a thousand other
tools for slaughtering a man bit by bit? Lay aside those means of
paralysing us with horror; silence the groans, the shrieks, the
hoarse cries extorted under torture. Of course you are pain –
pain which the gouty man scorns, the dyspeptic suffers while he
indulges himself, the girl endures in childbirth. You are mild if I
can bear you and short-lived if I cannot.
    15             Think these things over: you have often heard them and often
said them yourself, but you must give practical proof that you
have really absorbed them from others and uttered them sincerely.
For this is the most shocking charge commonly brought against
us, that we deal in the words of philosophy and not its works.
Well, then, have you just now realized that death looms over
you, or exile, or anguish? You were born to these things. Let us
    16         reflect that whatever can happen is going to happen. I am sure
you have done what I’m telling you to do: my point now is not
to let your mind be overwhelmed by this anxiety of yours, for it
will be deadened and lose its vigour when the time comes for it
to bestir itself to action. Divert it from your individual case to a
general one. Tell yourself that you have only a little body, frail
and mortal, and threatened by pain not only from ill-treatment
by superior strength. Pleasures themselves lead to pain, banquets
bring indigestion, excessive drinking brings muscular paralysis and
fits of trembling, lust brings deformity in hands, feet and all the
    17         joints. I shall become poor: I’ll be among the majority. I shall
become an exile: I’ll suppose myself a native of my place of
banishment. I shall be bound in fetters: so what? Am I free now?
Nature has tied me to this grievous weight of my body. I shall
die: what you mean is this – I shall cease to be liable to illness, I
shall cease to be liable to