The Text
Meditations VII.40
Our lives are reaped like the ripe ears of corn, And as one falls, another still is born.53
- 53.Euripides, Hypsipyle, Fragment 757; xi. 6. Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations iii. 25, § 59: Vita omnibus metenda, ut fruges. Epictetus’s Discourses ii. 6. 14. Compare Job v. 26.
Euripides’ Hypsipyle is a lost play known from quotations and fragments. Cicero’s Latin, in translation: “life must be reaped by all, like crops.” Job 5:26 has “Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season” (King James).