Moral Letters to Lucilius

​I saw Aufidius Bassus, an excellent man, shattered, struggling against his age. But now it weighs him down more than can be lifted up; old age has pressed upon him with a great and complete weight. You know that he has always been of a weak and drained body. For a long time he kept it together, and, to speak more truly, prolonged it; suddenly he failed.

​Just as in a ship which leaks water, one or two cracks are resisted, but when it begins to loosen and give way in very many places, help cannot be given to the gaping vessel; so in an old body weakness can be sustained and propped up to some extent. When, as in a decaying building, every joint is pulled apart, and while one part is being supported, another is torn asunder, one must look around to see how to get out.

​Yet our Bassus is cheerful in mind. Philosophy provides this: to be cheerful in the sight of death, and strong and joyful in whatever state of the body, and not failing, although one is being failed. A great helmsman sails even with a torn sail, and if he has lost his rigging, he nevertheless adapts the remains of his ship for the course. Our Bassus does this, and beholds his own end with that mind and countenance with which you would think one looks at someone else’s end, with excess of unconcern.

​This is a great thing, Lucilius, and one to be learned for a long time: when that inevitable hour arrives, to depart with an equal mind. Other kinds of death are mixed with hope: the disease ceases, the fire is extinguished, the collapse has deposited unharmed those whom it seemed about to crush; the sea, which had swallowed them up, has cast out unharmed with the same force by which it sucked them in; the soldier has recalled his sword from the very neck of the one about to perish. He whom old age leads to death has nothing to hope for. This alone cannot be intervened. By no other manner do men die more gently, but neither more lingeringly.

​Our Bassus seemed to me to be attending his own funeral, and composing himself, and living as if he were a survivor to himself, and wisely bearing the longing for himself. For he speaks much about death and strives diligently to persuade us that, if there is any discomfort or fear in this business, it is the fault of the dying person, not of death; and that there is no more trouble in death itself than there is after it.

​Moreover, he who fears what he is not going to suffer is just as mad as he who fears what he is not going to feel. Or does anyone believe this will happen, that she through whom nothing is felt, should herself be felt? “Therefore,” he says, “death is so far outside of all evil that it is outside of all fear of evils.”

​I know these things, both often said and often to be said, but neither when I read them did they profit me as much, nor when I heard them from those who said they were not to be feared, from whose fear they were absent; but this man indeed had the greatest authority with me, when he spoke of death close at hand.

​For I will say what I think: I think that he who is in death itself is stronger than he who is around death. For death, when brought near, has given even to the inexperienced the courage of not avoiding the inevitable. Thus a gladiator, most timid throughout the whole fight, offers his throat to his opponent and guides the wandering sword to himself. But that death which is in the vicinity and bound to come, demands a slow firmness of mind, which is rarer and cannot be provided except by the wise man.

​Most gladly, therefore, I listened to him as if he were passing sentence on death, and indicating what its nature was, as if it were inspected from closer quarters. More credit, as I think, and more weight it would have with you, if someone had come back to life and, having experienced it, narrated that there is nothing of evil in death; as to what disturbance the approach of death brings, those will best tell you who have stood next to her, who have both seen and received her coming.