C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Nothingness of Death
By Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99–c. 55 B.C.)
From ‘On the Nature of Things,’ Book Third: Translation of Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro
D
EATH therefore to us is nothing, concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal. And as in time gone by we felt no distress, when the Pœni [Carthaginians] from all sides came together to do battle, and all things shaken by war’s troublous uproar shuddered and quaked beneath high heaven, and mortal men were in doubt which of the two peoples it should be to whose empire all must fall by sea and land alike; thus when we shall be no more, when there shall have been a separation of body and soul, out of both of which we are each formed into a single being,—to us, you may be sure, who then shall be no more, nothing whatever can happen to excite sensation, not if earth shall be mingled with sea and sea with heaven. And even supposing the nature of the mind and power of the soul do feel, after they have been severed from our body, yet that is nothing to us, who by the binding tie of marriage between body and soul are formed each into one single being. And if time should gather up our matter after our death and put it once more into the position in which it now is, and the light of life be given to us again, this result even would concern us not at all, when the chain of our self-consciousness has once been snapped asunder.
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