behind was no more yours than what passed before you were born,[1] (b) and concerns you no more.
Respice enim quam nil ad nos ante acta vetustas
Temporis æterni fuerit.[2]
(a) Wherever your life ends, it is all there?[3] (c) The usefulness of living is not in length of time, but in its use.[4] A man may have lived long who has lived little.[5] Look well to life whilst you are in life. It depends on your will, not on the number of your years, whether you have lived long enough.[6] (a) Did you think that you were never to arrive where you were always going? (c) There is no road that has not its end.[7] (a) And if companionship can comfort you, does not all the world go the same way that you go?
(b) Omnia te vita perfuncta sequentur.[8]
(a) Does not every thing dance your dance? Is there any thing which does not grow old with you? A thousand men, a thousand beasts, and a thousand other creatures die at the same instant that you die.[9]
(b) Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora secuta est,
Que non audierit mistos vagitibus ægris
Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.[10]
(c) Wherefore do you recoil if you can not go back?[11] You have seen many men who have found it well to die, thus
- ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 69.
- ↑ For consider, how as nothing to us is the bygone antiquity of old times. — Lucretius, III, 972.
- ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 77.
- ↑ See Idem, Epistle 49.
- ↑ See Idem, Consolatio ad Marciam, 20, and Epistle 93.
- ↑ See Idem, Epistle 61.
- ↑ See Idem, Epistle 77.
- ↑ All things, when they have done with life, will follow thee. — Lucretius, III, 968.
- ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 77.
- ↑ For night has never followed day, nor dawn night, without hearing the sound of lamentation and plaintive wailings, the companions of death and of the sad funeral rites — Lucretius, II, 578.
- ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 107, where Seneca gives a Latin translation of the so-called “Prayer of Cleanthes” (the Stoic philosopher), which expresses more or less this same thought.
