hen they lose their children, wives,
or friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain,
though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved,
and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of
a dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as
intimate death to be the soul's remove and not destruction. And they
sometimes speak thus:

But I'll even there think on my dearest friend;
("Iliad," xxii. 390.)

and thus:--

What's your command to Hector? Let me know;
And to your dear old Priam shall I go?
(Euripides, "Hecuba," 422.)

And (there arising hereupon an erroneous deviation) they are the
better pleased when they bury with their departed friends such arms,
implements, or clothes as were most familiar to them in their lifetime;
as Minos did the Cretan flutes with Glaucus,

Made of the shanks of a dead brindled fawn.

And if they do but imagine they either ask or desire anything of them,
they are glad when they give it them. Thus Periander burnt his queen's
attire with her, because he thought she had asked for it and complained
she was a-cold. Nor doth an Aeacus, an Ascalaphus, or an Acheron much
disorder them whom they have often gratified with balls, shows, and
music of every sort. But now all men shrink from that face of death
which carries with it insensibility, oblivion, and extinction of
knowledge, as being dismal, grim, and dark. And they are discomposed
when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone or he
is no more; and they show great uneasiness when they hear such words as
these:--

Go to the wood-clad earth he must,
And there lie shrivelled into dust,
And ne'er more laugh or drink, or hear
The charming sounds of flute or lyre;

and these:--

But from our lips the vital spirit fled
Returns no more to wake the silent dead.
("Iliad," ix. 408.)

Wherefore they must needs cut the very throats of them that shall with
Epicurus tell them, We men were born once for all, and we cannot be born
twice, but our not being must last forever. For this will bring them to
slight their present good as little, or rather indeed as nothing at all
compared with everlastingness, and therefore to let it pass unenjoyed
and to become wholly negligent of virtue and action, as men disheartened
and brought to a contempt of themselves, as being but as it were of one
d