How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life PDF
Preview How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life
HOW TO DIE HOW TO DIE An Ancient Guide to the End of Life Seneca Edited, translated, and introduced by James S. Romm PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Permission for the Latin text as follows: L. Annaeus Seneca. Moral Essays: Volume 2 trans. by John W. Basore, William Heinemann Ltd., 1932. L. Annaei Senecae: Ad Lvcilivm, Epistulae Morales 1 by Seneca, arranged and annotated by L. D. Reynolds, Oxford University Press, 1965. Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium Libri IX et X—http://www.thelatin library.com/sen.html. Jacket art: Seneca the Younger / Alamy Stock Images All Rights Reserved ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17557-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941911 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Stempel Garamond LT Std and Futura Std Printed on acid- free paper ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 He lives badly who does not know how to die well. (on serenity of mind 11.4) CONTENTS Introduction ix How to Die xxi I. Prepare Yourself 1 II. Have No Fear 12 III. Have No Regrets 34 IV. Set Yourself Free 59 V. Become a Part of the Whole 92 Epilogue: Practice What You Preach 117 Latin Texts 123 Notes 217 INTRODUCTION Recent experiments have shown that psilo- cybin, a compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms, can greatly reduce the fear of death in terminal cancer patients. The drug imparts “an understanding that in the larg- est frame, everything is fine,” said pharma- cologist Richard Griffiths in a 2016 inter- view.1 Test subjects reported a sense of “the interconnectedness of all people and things, the awareness that we are all in this to- gether.” Some claimed to have undergone a mock death during their psychedelic expe- rience, to have “stared directly at death . . . in a kind of dress rehearsal,” as Michael Pollan wrote in a New Yorker account of ix INTRODUCTION these experiments.2 The encounter was felt to be not morbid or terrifying, but liberat- ing and affirmative. “In the largest frame, everything is fine.” That sounds very much like the message Lucius Annaeus Seneca preached to Roman readers of the mid- first century AD, rely- ing on Stoic philosophy, rather than an or- ganic hallucinogen, as a way to glimpse that truth. “The interconnectedness of all things” was also one of his principal themes, as was the idea that one must rehearse for death throughout one’s life— for life, properly un- derstood, is really only a journey toward death; we are dying every day, from the day we are born. In the passages collected here, excerpted from eight different works of ethical thought, Seneca spoke to his ad- dressees, and through them to humankind generally, about the need to accept death, x
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