Page:1888 Cicero's Tusculan Disputations.djvu/22

 obliged me to grant that the dead are not miserable, proceed to convince me that it is not miserable to be under a necessity of dying.

M. That is easy enough; but I have greater things in hand.

A. How comes that to be so easy? And what are those things of more consequence?

M. Thus: because, if there is no evil after death, then even death itself can be none; for that which immediately succeeds that is a state where you grant that there is no evil: so that even to be obliged to die can be no evil, for that is only the being obliged to arrive at a place where we allow that no evil is.

A. I beg you will be more explicit on this point, for these subtle arguments force me sooner to admissions than to conviction. But what are those more important things about which you say that you are occupied?

M. To teach you, if I can, that death is not only no evil, but a good.

A. I do not insist on that, but should be glad to hear you argue it, for even though you should not prove your point, yet you will prove that death is no evil. But I will not interrupt you; I would rather hear a continued discourse. M. What, if I should ask you a question, would you not answer?

A. That would look like pride; but I would rather you should not ask but where necessity requires.

IX. M. I will comply with your wishes, and explain as well as I can what you require; but not with any idea that, like the Pythian Apollo, what I say must needs be certain and indisputable, but as a mere man, endeavoring to arrive at probabilities by conjecture, for I have no ground to proceed further on than probability. Those men may call their statements indisputable who assert that what they say can be perceived by the senses, and who proclaim themselves philosophers by profession.

A. Do as you please: we are ready to hear you.

M. The first thing, then, is to inquire what death, which seems to be so well understood, really is; for some imagine death to be the departure of the soul from the body;