use the mere separation of the soul and body cannot be effected
without pain? but even should that be granted, how small a pain must that
be! Yet I think that it is false; and that it is very often unaccompanied
by any sensation at all, and sometimes even attended with pleasure: but
certainly the whole must be very trifling, whatever it is, for it is
instantaneous. What makes us uneasy, or rather gives us pain, is the
leaving all the good things of life. But just consider, if I might not
more properly say, leaving the evils of life; only there is no reason for
my now occupying myself in bewailing the life of man, and yet I might,
with very good reason; but what occasion is there, when what I am
labouring to prove is that no one is miserable after death, to make life
more miserable by lamenting over it? I have done that in the book which I
wrote, in order to comfort myself as well as I could. If, then, our
inquiry is after truth, death withdraws us from evil, not from good. This
subject is indeed so copiously handled by Hegesias, the Cyrenaic
philosopher, that he is said to have been forbid by Ptolemy from
delivering his lectures in the schools, because some who heard him made
away with themselves. There is too, an epigram of Callimachus,(69) on
Cleombrotus of Ambracia; who, without any misfortune having befallen him,
as he says, threw himself from a wall into the sea, after he had read a
boot of Plato's. The book I mentioned of that Hegesias, is called
{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}, or "A Man who starves himself," in which a man is represented
as killing himself by starvation, till he is prevented by his friends, in
reply to whom he reckons up all the miseries of human life: I might do the
same, though not so fully as he, who thinks it not worth any man's while
to live. I pass over others. Was it even worth my while to live, for, had
I died before I was deprived of the comforts of my own family, and of the
honours which I received for my public services, would not death have
taken me from the evils of life, rather than from its blessings?

XXXV. Mention, therefore, some one, who never knew distress; who never
received any blow fro