his pap the mortal place wherein he was to stab to whom he had given orders to kill him.  For this reason it was that Caesar, being asked what death he thought to be the most desired, made answer, “The least premeditated and the shortest.”—­[Tacitus, Annals, xvi. 15]—­ If Caesar dared to say it, it is no cowardice in me to believe it.”  A short death,” says Pliny, “is the sovereign good hap of human life.  “People do not much care to recognise it.  No one can say that he is resolute for death who fears to deal with it and cannot undergo it with his eyes open:  they whom we see in criminal punishments run to their death and hasten and press their execution, do it not out of resolution, but because they will not give them selves leisure to consider it; it does not trouble them to be dead, but to die: 

          “Emodi nolo, sed me esse mortem nihil astigmia:” 

     ["I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead.” 
     —­Epicharmus, apud Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., i. 8.]

’tis a degree of constancy to which I have experimented, that I can arrive, like those who plunge into dangers, as into the sea, with their eyes shut.

There is nothing, in my opinion, more illustrious in the life of Socrates, than that he had thirty whole days wherein to ruminate upon the sentence of his death, to have digested it all that time with a most assured hope, without care, and without alteration, and with a series of words and actions rather careless and indifferent than any way stirred or discomposed by the weight of such a thought.

That Pomponius Atticus, to whom Cicero writes so often, being sick, caused Agrippa, his son-in-law, and two or three more of his friends, to be called to him, and told them, that having found all means practised upon him for his recovery to be in vain, and that all he did to prolong his life also prolonged and augmented his pain, he was resolved to put an end both to the one and the other, desiring them to approve of his determination, or at least not to lose their labour in endeavouring to dissuade him.  Now, having chosen to destroy himself by abstinence, his disease was thereby cured:  the remedy that he had made use of to kill himself restored him to health.  His physicians and friends, rejoicing at so happy an event, and coming to congratulate him, found themselves very much deceived, it being impossible for them to make him alter his purpose, he telling them, that as he must one day die, and was now so far on his way, he would save himself the labour of beginning another time.  This man, having surveyed death at leisure, was not only not discouraged at its approach, but eagerly sought it; for being content that he had engaged in the combat, he made it a point of bravery to see the end; ’tis far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it.

The story of the philosopher Cleanthes is very like this:  he had his gums swollen and rotten; his physicians advised him to great abstinence:  having fasted two days, he was so much better that they pronounced him cured, and permitted him to return to his ordinary course of diet; he, on the contrary, already tasting some sweetness in this faintness of his, would not be persuaded to go back, but resolved to proceed, and to finish what he had so far advanced.