I do not consider the
death of Epaminondas or Leonidas preferable to his. One of whom defeated
the Lacedaemonians at Mantinea,(39) and finding that he had been rendered
insensible by a mortal wound, when he first came to himself, asked whether
his shield was safe? When his weeping friends had answered him that it
was, he then asked whether the enemy was defeated? And when he received to
this question also the answer which he wished, he then ordered the spear
which was sticking in him to be pulled out. And so, losing quantities of
blood, he died in the hour of joy and victory.

But Leonidas, the king of the Lacedaemonians, put himself and those three
hundred men, whom he had led from Sparta, in the way of the enemy of
Thermopylae,(40) when the alternative was a base flight, or a glorious
death. The deaths of generals are glorious, but philosophers usually die
in their beds. But still Epicurus here mentions what, when dying, he
considered great credit to himself. "I have," says he, "a joy to
counterbalance these pains." I recognise in these words, O Epicurus, the
sentiments of a philosopher, but still you forgot what you ought to have
said. For, in the first place, if those things be true, in the
recollection of which you say you rejoice, that is to say, if your
writings and discoveries are true, then you cannot rejoice. For you have
no pleasure here which you can refer to the body. But you have constantly
asserted that no one ever feels joy or pain except with reference to his
body. "I rejoice," says he, "in the past." In what that is past? If you
mean such past things as refer to the body, then I see that you are
counterbalancing your agonies with your reason, and not with your
recollection of pleasures which you have felt in the body. But if you are
referring to your mind, then your denial of there being any joy of the
mind which cannot be referred to some pleasure of the body, must be false.
Why, then, do you recommend the children of Metrodorus to Hermarchus? In
that admirable exercise of duty, in that excellent display of your good
faith, for that is how I look upon it, what is there that you refer to the
body?

XXXI. You may twist yourself about in every direction as you please,
Torquatus, but you will not find in this excellent letter anything written
by Epicurus which is in harmony and consistent with the rules he laid
down. And so he is convicted by himself, and his writings are upset by his
own virtue and good