pposed me had I been going to evil
and not to good.

4. Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is a
great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things:
either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or,
as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this
world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness,
but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight
of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to
select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams,
and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life,
and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the
course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think
that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king
will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.
Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is
then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another
place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my
friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the
pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the
professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who
are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus,
and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own
life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give
if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?
Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a
wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and
Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered
death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure,
as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I
shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as
in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who
pretends to be wise and is not. What would not a man give, O judges,
to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or
Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What
infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking
them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for
this; certai