Demosthenes: but you must plead for yourself before a very great
assembly. These things perhaps you dread, and therefore look on death as
an eternal evil.

VI. _A._ Do you take me to be so imbecile as to give credit to such
things?

_M._ What? do you not believe them?

_A._ Not in the least.

_M._ I am sorry to hear that.

_A._ Why, I beg?

_M._ Because I could have been very eloquent in speaking against them.

_A._ And who could not on such a subject? or, what trouble is it to refute
these monstrous inventions of the poets and painters?(55)

_M._ And yet you have books of philosophers full of arguments against
these.

_A._ A great waste of time, truly! for, who is so weak as to be concerned
about them?

_M._ If, then, there is no one miserable in the infernal regions, there
can be no one there at all.

_A._ I am altogether of that opinion.

_M._ Where, then, are those you call miserable? or what place do they
inhabit? for, if they exist at all, they must be somewhere?

_A._ I, indeed, am of opinion that they are nowhere.

_M._ Then they have no existence at all.

_A._ Even so, and yet they are miserable for this very reason, that they
have no existence.

_M._ I had rather now have you afraid of Cerberus, than speak thus
inaccurately.

_A._ In what respect?

_M._ Because you admit him to exist whose existence you deny with the same
breath. Where now is your sagacity? when you say any one is miserable, you
say that he who does not exist, does exist.

_A._ I am not so absurd as to say that.

_M._ What is it that you do say, then?

_A._ I say, for instance, that Marcus Crassus is miserable in being
deprived of such great riches as his by death; that Cn. Pompey is
miserable, in being taken from such glory and honour; and in short, that
all are miserable who are deprived of this light of life.

_M._ You have returned to the same point, for to be miserable implies an
existence; but you just now denied that the dead had any existence; if,
then, they have not, they can be nothing; and if so, they are not even
miserable.

_A._ Perhaps I do not express what I mean, for I look upon this very
circumstance, not to exist after having existed, to be very miserable.

_M._ What, more so than not to have existed at all? therefore, those who
are not yet born, are miserable because they are not; and we ourselves, if
we are to be miserable after death, were miserable before we were born:
but I do not remembe