“Don’t propose it,” he groaned.  “I don’t dare to think of such a thing!  What disgrace and trouble, if it should all come out!”

“Come, come, Ahenobarbus,” thrust in Marcus Laeca, who had been educated in Catilina’s school for polite villains and cut-throats.  “Pratinas is only proposing what, if you were a man of spirit, would have been done long ago.  You can’t complain of Fortune, when she’s put a handsome estate in your hands for the asking.”

“My admirable fellow,” said Pratinas, benevolently, “I highly applaud your scruples.  But, permit me to say it, I must ask you to defer to me as being a philosopher.  Let us look at the matter in a rational way.  We have gotten over any bogies which our ancestors had about Hades, or the punishments of the wicked.  In fact, what we know—­as good Epicureans—­is that, as Democritus of Abdera[59] early taught, this world of ours is composed of a vast number of infinitely small and indivisible atoms, which have by some strange hap come to take the forms we see in the world of life and matter.  Now the soul of man is also of atoms, only they are finer and more subtile.  At death these atoms are dissolved, and so far as that man is concerned, all is over with him.  The atoms may recombine, or join with others, but never form anew that same man.  Hence we may fairly conclude that this life is everything and death ends all.  Do you follow, and see to what I am leading?”

  [59] Born about 470 B.C.

“I think so,” said the wretched Lucius, feeling himself like a bird caught in a snare, yet not exactly grasping the direct bearing of all this learned exposition.

“My application is this,” went on Pratinas, glibly.  “Life is all—­all either for pleasure or pain.  Therefore every man has a right to extract all the sweetness he can out of it.  But suppose a man deliberately makes himself gloomy, extracts no joy from life; lets himself be overborne by care and sorrow,—­is not such a man better dead than living?  Is not a dreamless sleep preferable to misery or even cold asceticism?  And how much more does this all apply when we see a man who makes himself unhappy, preventing by his very act of existence the happiness of another more equably tempered mortal!  Now I believe this is the present case.  Drusus, I understand, is leading a spare, joyless, workaday sort of existence, which is, or by every human law should be, to him a burden.  So long as he lives, he prevents you from enjoying the means of acquiring pleasure.  Now I have Socrates of imperishable memory on my side, when I assert that death under any circumstances is either no loss or a very great gain.  Considering then the facts of the case in its philosophic and rational bearings, I may say this:  Not merely would it be no wrong to remove Drusus from a world in which he is evidently out of place, but I even conceive such an act to rise to the rank of a truly meritorious deed.”

Lucius Ahenobarbus was conquered.  He could not resist the inexorable logic of this train of reasoning, all the premises of which he fully accepted.  Perhaps, we should add, he was not very unwilling to have his wine-befuddled intellect satisfied, and his conscience stilled.  He turned down a huge beaker of liquor, and coughed forth:—­