hat they are happy;
but if they perish, I cannot suppose them to be unhappy, because, in fact,
they have no existence at all. You drove me to that concession but just
now.

_M._ How, then, can you, or why do you, assert that you think that death
is an evil, when it either makes us happy, in the case of the soul
continuing to exist, or, at all events, not unhappy, in the case of our
becoming destitute of all sensation.

XII. _A._ Explain, therefore, if it is not troublesome to you, first, if
you can, that souls do exist after death; secondly, should you fail in
that, (and it is a very difficult thing to establish,) that death is free
from all evil; for I am not without my fears that this itself is an evil;
I do not mean the immediate deprivation of sense, but the fact that we
shall hereafter suffer deprivation.

_M._ I have the best authority in support of the opinion you desire to
have established, which ought, and generally has, great weight in all
cases. And first, I have all antiquity on that side, which the more near
it is to its origin and divine descent, the more clearly, perhaps, on that
account did it discern the truth in these matters. This very doctrine,
then, was adopted by all those ancients, whom Ennius calls in the Sabine
tongue, Casci, namely, that in death there was a sensation, and that, when
men departed this life, they were not so entirely destroyed as to perish
absolutely. And this may appear from many other circumstances, and
especially from the pontifical rites and funeral obsequies, which men of
the greatest genius would not have been so solicitous about, and would not
have guarded from any injury by such severe laws, but from a firm
persuasion that death was not so entire a destruction as wholly to abolish
and destroy everything, but rather a kind of transmigration, as it were,
and change of life, which was, in the case of illustrious men and women,
usually a guide to heaven, while in that of others, it was still confined
to the earth, but in such a manner as still to exist. From this, and the
sentiments of the Romans,

In heaven Romulus with Gods now lives;

as Ennius saith, agreeing with the common belief; hence, too Hercules is
considered so great and propitious a god amongst the Greeks, and from them
he was introduced among us, and his worship has extended even to the very
ocean itself. This is how it was that Bacchus was deified, the offspring
of Semele; and from the same illust