Meditations III.3
Hippocrates, after healing many a sick man, fell sick himself and died. Many a death have Chaldaeans foretold, and then their own fate has overtaken them also.8 Alexander, Pompeius and Gaius Caesar times without number utterly destroyed whole cities, and cut to pieces many myriads of horse and foot on the field of battle, yet the day came when they too departed this life. Heraclitus, after endless speculations on the destruction of the world by fire, came to be filled internally with water, and died beplastered with cowdung. And lice caused the death of Democritus,9 and other vermin of Socrates.
What of this? Thou hast gone aboard, thou hast set sail, thou hast touched land; go ashore; if indeed for another life, there is nothing even there void of Gods; but if to a state of non-sensation,10 thou shalt cease being at the mercy of pleasure and pain and lackeying the bodily vessel11 which is so much baser than that which ministers to it. For the one is intelligence and a divine ‘genius,’ the other dust and putrescence.
- 8.See iv. 48.
- 9.Told of Pherecydes (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pherecydes v, viii.), of Speusippus (Life of Speusippus ix.), and even of Plato (Life of Plato xxix.), but not elsewhere of Democritus. Lucian (doubtful attribution), Long-Lived Men 15, says Democritus died of starvation aged 104.
Pherecydes of Syros was a 6th-century BC Greek thinker, traditionally a teacher of Pythagoras; Speusippus was Plato’s nephew and his successor as head of the Academy; and Democritus of Abdera (5th century BC) was, with Leucippus, the founder of atomism. Haines marks the attribution of Long-Lived Men to Lucian as doubtful.
- 10.Compare Justin Martyr’s Apology i. §§ 18, 57.
Justin Martyr addressed his First Apology to Antoninus Pius and his adopted sons, Marcus among them. In chapter 18 he argues that the dead retain sensation, since if death ended in insensibility it would be a boon to the wicked.
- 11.So vas animi, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations i. 22, § 52. Compare St. Paul, 1 Thessalonians iv. 4 (σκεῦος); Dio Chrysostom’s Orations xii., Reiske’s edition p. 404: ἀνθρώπινον σῶμα ὡς ἀγγεῖον φρονήσεως καὶ λόγου.
Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (45 BC) are five dialogues on death, pain, grief, and happiness; vas animi, “vessel of the soul,” is his image for the body. In 1 Thessalonians 4:4 Paul’s word is skeuos, “vessel.” The orator Dio Chrysostom’s twelfth oration, the Olympic Discourse, is cited by page in Johann Jakob Reiske’s 18th-century edition; the Greek, in translation: “the human body as a vessel of wisdom and reason.”