The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

AN ESSAY ON FRIENDSHIP 265
deities as to have passed at once from the supreme height
of human glory to the mansions of the celestial gods.
For I am by no means a convert to the new doctrine
which certain philosophers have lately endeavoured to
propagate ; who maintain that death extinguishes the
whole man, and his soul perishes with the dissolution of
his body. Indeed, the practice of our ancestors alone,
abstracted from the opinion of the ancient sages, weighs
more with me than all the arguments of these pretended
reasoners. For certainly our forefathers would not so
religiously have observed those sacred rites which have
been instituted in honour of the dead if
they had supposed
that the deceased were in no respect concerned in the
performance of them. But the conviction arising from
this consideration is much strengthened when I add to
it the authority of those great masters of reason, who
enlightened our country by the schools they established
in Great Greece, during the flourishing ages of that now
deserted part of Italy. And what has a still farther
influence in determining my persuasion is
the opinion of
that respectable moralist who, in the judgment of Apollo
himself, was declared to be the wisest of mankind. This
incomparable philosopher, without once varying to the
opposite side of the question (as his custom was upon
many other controverted subjects), steadily and firmly
asserted that the human soul is a divine and immortal
for its return to the
celestial mansions, and that the spirits of those just men
who have made the greatest progress in the paths of
substance, that death opens a way
virtue find the easiest and most expeditious admittance.
This also was the opinion of my departed friend : an
opinion which you may remember, Scaevola, he particularly
enlarged upon in that conversation which, a very short
time before his death, he held with you and me, in con
junction with Philus, Manilius, and a large company of
his other friends, on the subject of government. For in