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December 20th

FEAR THE FEAR OF DEATH

“Do you then ponder how the supreme of human evils, the surest

mark of the base and cowardly, is not death, but the fear of death?

I urge you to discipline yourself against such fear, direct all your

thinking, exercises, and reading this way—and you will know the

only path to human freedom.”

—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.26.38–39

o steel himself before he committed suicide rather than submit to Julius
Caesar’s destruction of the Roman Republic, the great Stoic
philosopher Cato read a bit of Plato’s Phaedo. In it, Plato writes, “It is the
child within us that trembles before death.” Death is scary because it is such
an unknown. No one can come back and tell us what it is like. We are in the
dark about it.
As childlike and ultimately ignorant as we are about death, there are
plenty of wise men and women who can at least provide some guidance.
There’s a reason that the world’s oldest people never seem to be afraid of
death: they’ve had more time to think about it than we have (and they
realized how pointless worrying was). There are other wonderful resources:
Florida Scott-Maxwell’s Stoic diary during her terminal illness, The
Measure of My Days, is one. Seneca’s famous words to his family and
friends, who had broken down and begged with his executioners, is another.
“Where,” Seneca gently chided them, “are your maxims of philosophy, or
the preparation of so many years’ study against evils to come?” Throughout
philosophy there are inspiring, brave words from brave men and women
who can help us face this fear.
There is another helpful consideration about death from the Stoics. If
death is truly the end, then what is there exactly to fear? For everything