to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature
of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made
so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that
good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But
death certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure,--all
these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make
us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

12. How quickly all things disappear,--in the universe the bodies
themselves, but in time the remembrance of them. What is the nature of
all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait
of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapory fame; how
worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they
are,--all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To
observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what
death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the
abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things
which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider
it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is
afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child. This, however, is not
only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the
purposes of nature. To observe too how man comes near to the Deity, and
by what part of him, and when this part of man is so disposed (VI. 28).

13. Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a
round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet says, and
seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbors, without
perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him, and
to reverence it sincerely. And reverence of the daemon consists in
keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction