us
pain, is the leaving all the good things of life. But just consider if
I might not more properly say, leaving the evils of life; only there is
no reason for my now occupying myself in bewailing the life of man, and
yet I might, with very good reason. But what occasion is there, when
what I am laboring to prove is that no one is miserable after death, to
make life more miserable by lamenting over it? I have done that in the
book which I wrote, in order to comfort myself as well as I could. If,
then, our inquiry is after truth, death withdraws us from evil, not
from good. This subject is indeed so copiously handled by Hegesias, the
Cyrenaic philosopher, that he is said to have been forbidden by Ptolemy
from delivering his lectures in the schools, because some who heard him
made away with themselves. There is, too, an epigram of Callimachus[20]
on Cleombrotus of Ambracia, who, without any misfortune having befallen
him, as he says, threw himself from a wall into the sea, after he had
read a book of Plato's. The book I mentioned of that Hegesias is called
[Greek: Apokarterteron], or "A Man who starves himself," in which a man
is represented as killing himself by starvation, till he is prevented
by his friends, in reply to whom he reckons up all the miseries of
human life. I might do the same, though not so fully as he, who thinks
it not worth any man's while to live. I pass over others. Was it even
worth my while to live, for, had I died before I was deprived of the
comforts of my own family, and of the honors which I received for my
public services, would not death have taken me from the evils of life
rather than from its blessings?

XXXV. Mention, therefore, some one, who never knew distress; who never
received any blow from fortune. The great Metellus had four
distinguished sons; but Priam had fifty, seventeen of whom were born to
him by his lawful wife. Fortune had the same power over both, though
she exercised it but on one; for Metellus was laid on his funeral pile
by a great company of sons and daughters, grandsons, and
granddaughters; but Priam fell by the hand of an enemy, after having
fled to the altar, and having seen himself deprived of all his numerous
progeny. Had he died before the death of his sons and the ruin of his
kingdom,

With all his mighty wealth elate,
Under rich canopies of state;

would he then have been taken from good or from evil? It would indeed,
at that time, have appeared that