Meditations IV.50
An unphilosophical, but none the less an effective, help to the contemning of death is to tell over the names of those who have clung long and tenaciously to life. How are they better off than those who were cut off before their time? After all, they lie buried somewhere at last, Cadicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, and any others like them, who after carrying many to their graves were at last carried to their own.82 Small, in any point of view, is the difference83 in length, and that too lived out to the dregs amid what great cares and with what sort of companions and in what kind of a body! Count it then of no consequence. For look at the yawning gulf of Time behind thee, and before thee at another Infinity to come. In this Eternity the life of a baby of three days and the life of a Nestor of three centuries84 are as one.85
- 82.See iv. 48, § 2.
- 83.See iv. 47.
- 84.τριγερήνιος, a clever conflation between τριγέρων and Γερήνιος, an epithet of Nestor from a town in Messenia.
- 85.Compare Ecclesiasticus xli. 4.
Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach, is a book of the Apocrypha. The verse has “there is no inquisition in the grave, whether thou have lived ten, or an hundred, or a thousand years” (King James).