Now if you suppose that there is no
consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even
by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person
were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by
dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his
life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in
the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think
that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will
not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now, if
death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a
single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as
men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be
greater than this?
"If, indeed, when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered
from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges,
who are said to give judgment there,--Minos, and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus,
and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own
life,--that pilgrimage will be worth making.
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