and studies with death. There would not be means and matter enough of
cruelty, did we not mix with them things that nature has exempted from
all sense and suffering, as reputation and the products of the mind, and
did we not communicate corporal punishments to the teachings and
monuments of the Muses. Now, Labienus could not suffer this loss, nor
survive these his so dear issue, and therefore caused himself to be
conveyed and shut up alive in the monument of his ancestors, where he
made shift to kill and bury himself at once. 'Tis hard to shew a more
vehement paternal affection than this. Cassius Severus, a man of great
eloquence and his very intimate friend, seeing his books burned, cried
out that by the same sentence they should as well condemn him to the fire
too, seeing that he carried in his memory all that they contained. The
like accident befel Cremutius Cordus, who being accused of having in his
books commended Brutus and Cassius, that dirty, servile, and corrupt
Senate, worthy a worse master than Tiberius, condemned his writings to
the flame. He was willing to bear them company, and killed himself with
fasting. The good Lucan, being condemned by that rascal Nero, at the
last gasp of his life, when the greater part of his blood was already
spent through the veins of his arms, which he had caused his physician to
open to make him die, and when the cold had seized upon all his
extremities, and began to approach his vital parts, the last thing he had
in his memory was some of the verses of his Battle of Phaysalia, which he
recited, dying with them in his mouth. What was this, but taking a
tender and paternal leave of his children, in imitation of the
valedictions and embraces, wherewith we part from ours, when we come to
die, and an effect of that natural inclination, that suggests to our
remembrance in this extremity those things which were dearest to us
during the time of our life?

Can we believe that Epicurus who, as he says himself, dying of the