Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON DEATH. [1] What remains now concerning death is that our subject should come to rest exactly where the soul itself is brought to its consummation. And yet Epicurus, on a fairly popular assumption, has denied that death has anything to do with us. "What is dissolved," he says, "lacks sensation; what lacks sensation is nothing to us." But it is not death itself that is dissolved and lacks sensation — it is the man who undergoes it. Yet Epicurus assigned the suffering to the very one to whom the acting belongs. But if it belongs to man to suffer death, the dissolver of the body and the destroyer of sensation, how strange, then, to claim that a power of such magnitude has nothing at all to do with man! [2] Seneca, arguing rather more forcefully, says that after death everything ends, even death itself. If that is so, then death will already have something to do with itself, if it too comes to an end — and all the more to do with man, in whom, amid the ending of all things, death itself is also ended. "Death is nothing to us" — very well, then life too is nothing to us. For if that by which we are dissolved lies outside us, then so does that by which we are put together. If the removal of sensation is nothing to us, neither is the acquiring of sensation anything to us. [3] But whoever does away with death let him do away with the soul as well; as for us, we shall treat of death, to which we ourselves belong even if it does not belong to us, just as we shall treat of the afterlife and of the soul's other province. And indeed, sleep is death's own mirror, no material foreign to it.