You Want To Live, But What Have You Ever Done That’s Worthy Of Light?

Do you suppose that I’m now going to recount the examples of great men? I’ll tell you of youth instead. There’s that Spartan whom legend tells of still a boy, who, when captured by enemies, shouted, in his native Doric dialect, “I won’t be a slave!” and then made good on his words: the first time he was ordered to perform a slavish and demeaning task—he was told to bring the chamber pot—he broke his skull by dashing it against a wall. That’s how near at hand freedom is, so why should anyone be a slave? Wouldn’t you rather your son dies like that, than to live to old age through inaction? Why then are you troubled, when dying bravely is a task even for boys?

Let’s say you refuse to follow; you’ll be led against your will. So, make your own the rules that belong to another power. You won’t take up the boy’s attitude and say, “I am not slave”? You poor man—you’re a slave to people, to things, to life (for a life lived without the courage to die is slavery).

What do you have to look forward to? You have exhausted those pleasures that delay and detain you in life. There is nothing you would find new, nothing with which you are not sated to the point of disgust. You know the taste of wine and mead. It doesn’t matter whether a hundred amphoras’ worth passes through your bladder, or a thousand; you’re just a wineskin. You know very well the taste of the oyster and the mullet; your self-indulgence has set nothing aside, untried, for coming years. Yet these are the things you are torn away from only against your will. What else is there that you might be pained to see torn away from you? Your friends? But do you know how to be a friend? Your country? Do you value that high enough to postpone your dinner for? The sunlight? You’d snuff that out if you could; for what have you ever done that’s worthy of light?

Admit it: it’s not the yearning for the senate house, or for the forum, or even for the natural world that makes you reluctant to die; it’s the grocery market that you leave behind unwillingly, a place from which you have left nothing behind. You fear death; but look how you scorn it, amid your banquet of mushrooms! You want to live, but do you know how? You’re afraid to die: why is that? Isn’t this life of yours a death?

Julius Caesar, when going along the Via Latina, was met by one from a file of guarded prisoners, a man whose beard trailed down to his chest, who asked him for death. “So you’re living now?” Caesar said. That’s how we must respond to those whom death is coming to aid. “You’re afraid to die, but are you living now?” “But I want to live,” the man says; “I’m doing honorable tings. I don’t want to leave behind the duties of life, which I’m carrying out faithfully and diligently.” What, do you not realize that dying, too, if one of these duties of life? You’re not abandoning any duty. There’s no set number of these, no limit you have to reach.

There’s no life that’s not short. If you examine the nature of things, even the life of Nestor is short, or that of Satia, who ordered inscribed on her tombstone that she lived have lived ninety-nine years. You see in her someone glorying in her old age. But who could have endured her, if she lived out a full century? (lol) Just as with storytelling, so as with life: its important how well it’s done, not how long. It doesn’t matter at what point you call a halt. Stop whenever you like; only put a good closer on it. Farewell.

-“How to die: An ancient guide to the end of life” from Seneca, translated by James S. Romm.