Stoic Meditations

Away, then, with those follies, such as that it is miserable to die before our time. What time do you mean? That of nature? But she has only lent you life, as she might lend you money, without fixing any certain time for its repayment.

The process of nature is this: that in the same manner as our birth was the beginning of things with us, so death will be the end; and as we were not concerned with anything before we were born, so neither shall we be after we are dead.

It never occurs to a man that such a disaster may befall himself. As if the number of the happy exceeded that of the miserable; or as if there were any certainty in human affairs.

Cicero argues that sometimes people live too long for their own good. Which makes the Stoic point that life itself is not an intrinsic good, but the means by which we exercise virtue.

Death, says Cicero, overtakes us quickly, and it is therefore endurable. It is the thought of leaving people and things behind that is painful. But the Stoics have a unique argument for why we should overcome that fear.

For the whole life of a philosopher is, as [Socrates] says, a meditation on death.

Why exactly to we grieve when loved ones are gone? Is it about them, about us? Does it depend on what we think will happen to them after death?

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?

Cicero mentions a number of accounts of the nature of the soul, explaining that the Stoic take is that the soul is a physical attribute responsible for our faculty of judgment. And it perishes with us.

Nature has presented us with this bargain: either not being born at all, or being born a mortal. Everything else is the fantasy of priests bent on scaring and controlling us, as Epicurus put it.