_A._ I agree to that. And if they do exist, I admit that they are
happy; but if they perish, I cannot suppose them to be unhappy,
because, in fact, they have no existence at all. You drove me to that
concession but just now.

_M._ How, then, can you, or why do you, assert that you think that
death is an evil, when it either makes us happy, in the case of the
soul continuing to exist, or, at all events, not unhappy, in the case
of our becoming destitute of all sensation?

XII. _A._ Explain, therefore, if it is not troublesome to you, first,
if you can, that souls do exist after death; secondly, should you fail
in that (and it is a very difficult thing to establish), that death is
free from all evil; for I am not without my fears that this itself is
an evil: I do not mean the immediate deprivation of sense, but the fact
that we shall hereafter suffer deprivation.

_M._ I have the best authority in support of the opinion you desire to
have established, which ought, and generally has, great weight in all
cases. And, first, I have all antiquity on that side, which the more
near it is to its origin and divine descent, the more clearly, perhaps,
on that account, did it discern the truth in these matters. This very
doctrine, then, was adopted by all those ancients whom Ennius calls in
the Sabine tongue Casci; namely, that in death there was a sensation,
and that, when men departed this life, they were not so entirely
destroyed as to perish absolutely. And this may appear from many other
circumstances, and especially from the pontifical rites and funeral
obsequies, which men of the greatest genius would not have been so
solicitous about, and would not have guarded from any injury by such