Aeschylus
1
seems admirably to rebuke those who think that death is an evil. He says :
Men are not right in hating Death, which is The
greatest succour from our many ills.
In imitation of Aeschylus
some one else has said :
[p. 133]
O Death, healing physician, come.2
For
it is indeed true that
A harbour from all distress
is Hades.3
For it is a magnificent thing to be able to say
with undaunted conviction :
What man who recks not
death can be a slave?4
and
With Hades' help shadows I do not fear.5
For what is there
cruel or so very distressing in being dead ? It may be that the phenomenon
of death, from being too familiar and natural to us, seems somehow, under
changed circumstances, to be painful, though I know not why. For what wonder
if the separable be separated, if the soluble be dissolved, if the
combustible be consumed, and the corruptible be corrupted ? For at what time
is death not existent in our very selves ? As Heracleitus
6 says : ‘Living
and dead are potentially the same thing, and so too waking and sleeping,
and young and old ; for the latter revert to the former, and the former
in turn to the latter.’ For as one is able from the same clay to
model figures of living things and to obliterate them, and again to model
and obliterate, and alternately to repeat these operations without ceasing,
so Nature, using the same material, a long time ago raised up our
forefathers, and then in close succession to them created our fathers, and
then ourselves, and
[p. 135] later will create others and still
others in a neverending cycle ; and the stream of generation, thus flowing
onward perpetually, will never stop, and so likewise its counterpart,
flowing in the opposite direction—which is the stream of
destruction, whether it be designated by the poets as Acheron or as Cocytus.
The same agency which at the first showed us the light of the sun brings
also the darkness of Hades. May not the air surrounding us serve to
symbolize this, causing as it does day and night alternately, which bring us
life and death, and sleep and waking ? Wherefore it is said that life is a
debt to destiny, the idea being that the loan which our forefathers
contracted is to be repaid by us. This debt we ought to discharge cheerfully
and without bemoaning whenever the lender asks for payment; for in this way
we should show ourselves to be most honourable men.
