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bonds, I shall cease to be liable to death.
    18             I am not so gauche as to keep repeating the Epicurean refrain
here, that fears about the underworld are groundless, and there is
no Ixion turning on his wheel, no Sisyphus heaving a stone uphill
with his shoulders, no possibility of anyone’s entrails being daily
devoured and reborn. No one is so childish as to fear Cerberus
and darkness and the spectral forms of skeletons. Death either
destroys us or sets us free. If we are released, the better part of us
    19         remains having lost its burden; if we are destroyed, nothing
remains and good and evil alike are removed. Allow me at this
point to quote your own verse, first warning you to deem it
written not for others but even for yourself. It is shocking to say
one thing and think another: how much worse to write one thing
and think another! I recall that you once treated this topic, that
    20         we don’t suddenly meet death but gradually approach it. Every
day we die, for every day part of our life is lost, and even when
we are growing bigger our life is growing shorter. We have lost
successively childhood, boyhood, youth. Right up to yesterday
all the time which has passed has been lost, and this present day
itself we share with death. It is not the last drop of water which
empties the water-clock, but all that dripped out previously. In
the same way the final hour when we actually die does not alone
bring our death but simply completes the process. At that point
we have arrived at death, but we have been journeying thither
    21         for a long time. When you had established this with your usual
eloquence, always noble but never more pungent than when your
words match the truth, you then said: ‘We face more deaths than
one: ’tis the last one takes us off.’ I’d rather you read your own
words than my letter: you will see clearly that this death which
we fear is not the only one, only the last.
    22             I see what you are looking for: you are wondering what I’ve
packed into this letter, what spirited remark of somebody, what
useful precept. I’ll send you something straight from my current
reading. Epicurus rebukes equally those who wish for death and
those who fear it, saying, ‘It is silly to run to meet death through
boredom with life, when it is just because of your life-style that
    23         you have created the need to do so’. Similarly he remarks elsewhere:
‘What is so silly as to seek death when it is the fear of death
which has made your life anxious?’ You can add this reflection too
which makes the same point: so great is human thoughtlessness,
even madness, that certain people are driven to death by the fear
of it.
    24             Pondering over any of these thoughts will fortify your mind
to endure either death or life; for we have to be advised and strengthened
to face both without either loving or hating our life too
much. Even when reason persuades us to end our lives we should
    25         not follow this urge rashly or impetuously. A brave and wise man
should not flee from life but step out of it, and that mood above
all must be avoided which grips many men – a passion for dying.
For, Lucilius, there is an unthinking tendency towards death, as
towards other things, which often gets hold of men of noble and
most energetic character, and often men who are indolent and
spiritless: the former despise life, the latter are flattened by it.
    26         Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same
things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a
feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy
which makes us say,