Indeed, I have been traveling along the road to death since the very day I came into this world. From a green grape to a ripened cluster to a shriveled raisin, everything in Nature has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Each stage of man has its own ending or demise—childhood, adolescence, prime, and old age. Assuredly, this body is not the one to which my mother gave birth. Indeed, I’ve been changing, dying, every day since I was born. If there is nothing to fear in that, then why should I fear the final step? And if death is a loss of awareness, then why should I fret? For only that which is something can be good or evil, but death is nothing, the mere absence of experience. It’s no worse than sleep. Moreover, death is a release from all pain, a boundary beyond which our sufferings cannot go. It returns us to that state of peacefulness in which we lay before we were even born. I was dead for countless eons before my birth, and it did not vex me then. I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care—as the Epicureans say.
For if it troubles me not at all that my body only occupies a small portion of space, then why should I be afraid that it only occupies a small span of time? In any case, from another point of view, we don’t disappear into nothingness but are dispersed back into Nature. I shall be returned to the earth from which my father drew his seed, my mother her blood, my nurse her milk, and from which I have taken my daily food and drink. For everything comes ultimately from one source and returns there taking another form. It is as though from softened wax you might shape a little horse, then a little tree, then a human form. Nothing is ever really destroyed, just sent back into Nature’s arms and turned into something else, over and over—one thing becomes another.
Today a drop of semen, tomorrow a pile of ash or bones. Not eternal, but mortal; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day. Like an hour I must come and like an hour pass away. The more our minds comprehend that we are parts of the whole in this way, the more we realize our own body’s frailty. I always reminded myself that I wasn’t meant to live a thousand years and that death would be here for me soon enough. I lived each day as if it were to be my last, preparing myself for this very moment. Now that it’s finally upon me, I realize it’s just the same as every other moment. I have the choice to die well or die badly. Philosophy has prepared me well enough. Do you suppose that human life can seem any great matter, said Socrates, to a great-souled individual who has embraced the whole of time and the whole of reality in his thoughts? No. To such a person not even death will seem terrible.
My soul disperses for a while, in drowsy reveries, teetering on the brink of insensibility. What a miraculous power thought has to travel swiftly across the world, or to consume grand vistas, enveloping more and more within its scope. Roaming dreamily over the whole wide world and bidding it farewell, I realize that I have taken flight above it. Like Homer’s Zeus, looking down on earth from Mount Olympus, observing now the lands of the horse-loving Thracians, now Greece, Persia, India, and surrounding everything the wine-dark sea. Or like our Scipio Aemilianus, who, slumbering in Numidia, dreamt that he was transported aloft, allowed to gaze down briefly on the world of men from among the stars.
I have long prepared my mind to embrace the most comprehensive outlook through the daily practice of philosophy. Plato said anyone seeking to understand human affairs should gaze down upon all earthly things this way, as though from a high watchtower. Each day I would rehearse, just as my teachers did, imagining myself suddenly raised aloft and looking down on the complex tapestry of human life from high above. Now, as the life keeps fading from my body, my daydreams turn into visions, real enough to touch. How insignificant the countless things men squabble over seem from this high vantage point. Like children, though, who think only of what baubles belong to their play, men, their minds captivated by narrow fears and desires, are alienated from Nature as a whole.
I can see them now below me, the great herds of human animals: numerous workers toiling in the fields, far-traveled merchants of all nations, and huge armies massed for battle—all of them like ants scuttling over the earth. Always busy at something, an anonymous, swarming mass, wandering astray down the countless labyrinthine paths that stretch before them. Men, women, and children, slaves and nobles, those being born and those dying, marrying and separating, celebrating festivals and mourning their losses; the tiresome clapping of tongues in courts of law—I see a hundred thousand faces of friends and strangers pass me by. I see great cities growing from humble settlements, thriving for a spell, then one day crumbling into deserted ruins. Races barbarous in their infancy, struggling toward civilization, then falling into barbarism again; after darkness and ignorance come arts and sciences, then the inevitable descent once again into darkness and ignorance. I see exotic and undiscovered races hidden in the far corners of the world. The many different rituals, languages, and stories of men. The countless lives of others long ago and the lives that will be lived many years from now after my own demise. And even though I was fated to be acclaimed the emperor of Rome, how few there are in the vast world who have even heard my name, let alone known me for who I really am. Those who do will soon be gone themselves and forgotten.
I find myself marveling once more at the soul’s capacity to rid itself of myriad unnecessary troubles in this way. Enlarging itself, embracing the whole universe, and reflecting on the finitude and transience of all individual things, the brevity of our entire life, and the lives of others, when compared to the eternity of time. We become magnanimous, great-souled, by expanding our minds and rising above trivial things, which belong far beneath us. The soul flies free when it’s not weighed down by earthly fears and desires and returns to its homeland, a citizen of the entire cosmos, making its abode the immeasurable vastness of universal Nature.
Thanks be to the gods that I was encouraged to make a habit of picturing the whole cosmos thus, and contemplating the immensity of both time and space. I learned to set each particular thing in life against the whole substance of the universe in my mind’s eye and see it as far less than a fig seed, and measure it against the whole of time as nothing more than the turn of a screw. For what is impossible to see with mortal eyes is nevertheless possible to grasp with the intellect.
Before me now a mental image forms: the representation of a shining sphere enclosing all creation, each part distinct but nevertheless one, gathered into a single vision. All the stars of the heavens, the sun, the moon, our earth, both land and sea, and all living creatures, just as though seen within a transparent globe, which I can almost imagine holding in the palm of my hand. From this cosmic perspective, in truth, to rail against the universe in fury over all the troubles in history would be like weeping over a cut on my smallest finger.
My life all but over, nothing remains—no fears and no desires to separate me from the rest of Nature. I see before me the whole of the cosmos, its vast design, and the mighty revolutions performed by the celestial orbs. And I find myself plunged deep in this imagination, traversing the heavens above, as strength leaves my limbs.
In this vast ocean of being, what a minute dot our whole earth seems. Asia and Europe in their entirety are merely specks of dirt, the great oceans nothing but a raindrop, and the highest mountain merely a grain of sand.
I can only admire the grace and majesty of the stars as my mind is blessed to accompany them, and I marvel further still at the vision of the whole cosmos before me. May I be transformed through the proximity of death into something worthy of Nature and the cosmos, an alien in my motherland no more. Traveling through the breadth of Nature, my mind expands to a vastness that envelops individual events, swallowing them up and making them appear like a pinpoint by comparison. Where is the tragedy in such negligible incidents? Where is the surprise or astonishment?