Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.38

M. Why, then, should Camillus be affected with the thoughts of these things happening three hundred and fifty years after his time? And why should I be uneasy it I were to expect that some nation might possess itself of this city ten thousand years hence? Because so great is our regard for our country, as not to be measured by our own feeling, but by its own actual safety.

 

Death, then, which threatens us daily from a thousand accidents, and which, by reason of the shortness of life, can never be far off, does not deter a wise man from making such provision for his country and his family as he hopes may last forever; and from regarding posterity, of which he can never have any real perception, as belonging to himself. 

 

Wherefore a man may act for eternity, even though he be persuaded that his soul is mortal; not, indeed, from a desire of glory, which he will be insensible of, but from a principle of virtue, which glory will inevitably attend, though that is not his object. 

 

The process, indeed, of nature is this: that just in the same manner as our birth was the beginning of things with us, so death will be the end; and as we were in no ways concerned with anything before we were born, so neither shall we be after we are dead. 

 

And in this state of things where can the evil be, since death has no connection with either the living or the dead? The one have no existence at all, the other are not yet affected by it. 

 

They who make the least of death consider it as having a great resemblance to sleep; as if anyone would choose to live ninety years on condition that, at the expiration of sixty, he should sleep out the remainder. The very swine would not accept of life on those terms, much less I. 

 

Endymion, indeed, if you listen to fables, slept once on a time on Latmus, a mountain of Caria, and for such a length of time that I imagine he is not as yet awake. Do you think that he is concerned at the Moon’s being in difficulties, though it was by her that he was thrown into that sleep, in order that she might kiss him while sleeping. 

 

For what should he be concerned for who has not even any sensation? You look on sleep as an image of death, and you take that on you daily; and have you, then, any doubt that there is no sensation in death, when you see there is none in sleep, which is its near resemblance? 

—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.38

 

I am delighted by this wonderful twist to the arguments about life and death, a subtle yet critical distinction between what I may still directly experience, and what I may purposely work toward for after I am gone. The power of understanding makes it possible to prepare for outcomes I will no longer be around to appreciate, where the good in the deeds does not require any future gratification for me. 

 

Camillus may not feel anything about the Rome of Cicero’s day, though he was the sort of fellow who acted out of a care for her long-term welfare. Cicero may not feel anything about the Rome of the present day, though he was the sort of fellow who ultimately offered up his life so that Rome’s descendants could have the chance to be free. 

 

While the vicious look only to their immediate pleasure, the virtuous look more broadly to the improvement of the whole. What the wicked call love always demands further compensation, even as what the righteous call love is pleased by the giving alone. Where I dwell upon the dignity of the act itself, it will stand on its own merits, and I do not need to ask for reward or recognition. 

 

If the soul does indeed die with the body, this proves the point even more, for it makes no difference to the decent man whether there will be any forthcoming luxuries or accolades. He does not fear death, since the quantity of his living does not change anything about the quality of his living. 

 

What the Stoics grasp, and what so many of us gloss over, is how the course of our lives depends entirely upon the most fundamental judgments we make about meaning and value. 

 

When I choose to be ruled by my appetites, I will dread the prospect of no longer winning what I desire and destroying what I despise; my nature is reduced to an endless hunger of the concupiscible and the irascible. Death will deny me such cravings. 

 

When, however, I choose to find joy in the exercise of character, I find contentment in something complete and self-sufficient; my nature can rest in simplicity at any moment. Death can take nothing from me. 

 

Some will speak of death as an endless sleep, as if to make it sound more agreeable, but as Cicero points out, it would seem foolish to find any benefit in somehow “living” without awareness. 

 

I find it difficult to relate to the analogy, since I always dream very vividly, so I assume that the reference is to a dreamless sleep. In that case, there is nothing to gain, and nothing to lose, in a state where nothing remains of perception. The noble soul is not troubled by this, though the base soul is filled with horror. One has already finished the job, and the other has left it undone. 

—Reflection written in 5/1996 

IMAGE: Anne-Louis Girodet, The Sleep of Endymion (1791)