k
and encircle on his pap the mortal place wherein he was to stab to whom
he had given orders to kill him. For this reason it was that Caesar,
being asked what death he thought to be the most desired, made answer,
"The least premeditated and the shortest."--[Tacitus, Annals, xvi. 15]--
If Caesar dared to say it, it is no cowardice in me to believe it."
A short death," says Pliny, "is the sovereign good hap of human life.
"People do not much care to recognise it. No one can say that he is
resolute for death who fears to deal with it and cannot undergo it with
his eyes open: they whom we see in criminal punishments run to their
death and hasten and press their execution, do it not out of resolution,
but because they will not give them selves leisure to consider it; it
does not trouble them to be dead, but to die:

"Emodi nolo, sed me esse mortem nihil astigmia:"

["I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead."
--Epicharmus, apud Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 8.]

'tis a degree of constancy to which I have experimented, that I can
arrive, like those who plunge into dangers, as into the sea, with their
eyes shut.

There is nothing, in my opinion, more illustrious in the life of
Socrates, than that he had thirty whole days wherein to ruminate upon the
sentence of his death, to have digested it all that time with a most
assured hope, without care, and without alteration, and with a series of
words and actions rather careless and indifferent than any way stirred or
discomposed by the weight of such a thought.

That Pomponius Atticus, to whom Cicero writes so often, being sick,
caused Agrippa, his son-in-law, and two or three more of his friends, to
be called to him, and told them, that having found all means practised
upon him for his recovery to be in vain, and that all he did to prolong
his life also prolonged and augmented his pain, he was resolved to put an
end both to the one and the other, desiring them to approve of his
determination, or at least not to lose their labour in endeavouring to
dissuade him. Now, having chosen to destroy himself by abstinence, his
disease was thereby cured: the remedy that he had made use of to kill
himself restored him to health. His physicians and friends, rejoicing at
so happy an event, and coming to congratulate him, found themselves very
much deceived, it being impossible for them to make him alter his
purpose, he telling them, that as he must one