Book 10
1.124
For the utterances of the multitude about the gods are not true preconceptions but false assumptions; hence it is that the greatest evils happen to the wicked and the greatest blessings happen to the good from the hand of the gods, seeing that they are always favourable to their own good qualities and take pleasure in men like unto themselves, but reject as alien whatever is not of their kind.
1.124
Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality.
1.125
For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly apprehended that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.The striking resemblance to this passage of ps.-Plat. Axiochus, 369 b, has often been pointed out, most recently by E. Chevallier, Etude crit. du dialogue ps.-plat. l’Axiochos (Lyon, 1914, pp. 74 sq.); he rightly maintains the priority of the letter to Menoeceus (ib. p. 76). But in the world, at one time men shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life.
