Meditations XII.34

Most efficacious in instilling a contempt for death is the fact that those who count pleasure a good and pain an evil have nevertheless contemned it.⁷⁰

• 70.For example, Otho, Petronius, and Epicurus, for whose famous syllogism on death see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights ii. 8; Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus xxxi. § 2, and compare Bacon’s Essay “On Death.”

  Otho, emperor for three months in 69, took his own life after his army’s defeat at Bedriacum; Petronius, Nero’s arbiter of taste, was forced to suicide in 66. Epicurus’s syllogism runs: death is nothing to us, for what is dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us. Bacon’s essay is titled “Of Death” in his Essays (1625).