Meditations X.36
There is no one so fortunate as not to have one or two standing by his death-bed who will welcome the evil which is befalling him. Say he was a worthy man and a wise; will there not be some one at the very end to say in his heart, We can breathe again at last, freed from this schoolmaster,64 not that he was hard on any of us, but I was all along conscious that he tacitly condemns us? So much for the worthy, but in our own case how many other reasons can be found for which hundreds would be only too glad to be quit of us! Think then upon this when dying, and thy passing from life will be easier if thou reason thus: I am leaving a life in which even my intimates for whom I have so greatly toiled, prayed, and thought,65 aye even they wish me gone, expecting belike to gain thereby some further ease.66 Why then should anyone cling to a longer sojourn here?
Howbeit go away with no less kindliness towards them on this account, but maintaining thy true characteristics be friendly and goodnatured and gracious; nor again as though wrenched apart, but rather should thy withdrawal from them be as that gentle slipping away of soul from body which we see when a man makes a peaceful end. For it was Nature that knit and kneaded thee with them, and now she parts the tie. I am parted from kinsfolk, not dragged forcibly away, but unresistingly. For this severance too is a process of Nature.67
- 64.Compare Vopiscus, Life of Aurelian, 37, § 3; Seneca’s Epistles 11.
Flavius Vopiscus is another of the purported authors of the Historia Augusta. In his eleventh letter Seneca advises choosing a good man to keep always before one’s eyes, as a guardian of one’s conduct.
- 65.Herodian, i. 4, § 3.
- 66.Is he thinking of Commodus?
- 67.See ix. 3.