The Theater of Dying Well — The Essays of Montaigne

When we judge another's assurance in death, Montaigne says we must take heed of one thing: men very hardly believe themselves to have arrived at that period. Few come to die in the opinion that it is their latest hour, and there is nothing wherein the flattery of hope more deludes us. It never ceases to whisper that others have been much sicker without dying, that the condition is not so desperate, and that, at the worst, God has done other miracles. We set too much value upon ourselves. It seems as if the universality of things would suffer by our dissolution, like people at sea to whom mountains, fields, and cities recede. Old age applauds the past and condemns the present. Caesar, more tumid than the sea that threatened him, tells his pilot that the only just cause for fear is not knowing his passenger, and to sail on, secure in Caesar's guardianship. The public later fancies the sun mourned a whole year for his death. Pliny answers that there is no such alliance with heaven that the brightness of the stars should be made mortal by our death.

To judge constancy in a man who does not yet believe himself certainly in danger, though he really is, is not reason. Most men set a good face and speak with great indifference to acquire a reputation they hope afterwards, living, to enjoy. A cruel Roman emperor would make prisoners feel death; if one killed himself in prison, that fellow had made an escape. Heliogabalus builds a gilt tower, gold cords, a gold sword, and emerald poison so his death will not give the lie to the rest of his life, yet the effeminacy of those preparations makes it likely he would have thought better of it at the test. Others who determined to despatch themselves fail at the point: Lucius Domitius poisons himself and repents; a man of Montaigne's time cannot thrust home; Plautius Silvanus cannot use the poniard his grandmother sent and has servants cut his veins; Albucilla, Demosthenes after Sicily, and C. Fimbria strike too weakly. Ostorius, who cannot use his own arm, makes the servant only hold the poniard straight and firm, and thrusts his throat upon it. Caesar, asked what death he thought most desired, answers the least premeditated and the shortest. People who run to their execution do it not out of resolution but because they will not give themselves leisure to consider it: it does not trouble them to be dead, but to die. Nothing is more illustrious in the life of Socrates than the thirty whole days he had to ruminate upon the sentence of his death, without care and without alteration.

Pomponius Atticus, finding that all he did to prolong his life also prolonged his pain, resolves to end both by abstinence. The disease is thereby cured, yet he will not go back, telling his friends that as he must one day die, and is now so far on his way, he will save himself the labour of beginning another time. Cleanthes, advised to fast for rotten gums, tastes a sweetness in the faintness and will not return to ordinary diet. Tullius Marcellinus, more troubled by disease than he is willing to endure, calls a council of friends. A Stoic tells him it is no great matter to live, but a great thing to die handsomely, and that he who makes a man live against his will does as cruel as to kill him. Marcellinus divides money among his servants, forsakes nourishment, and on the third day faints by degrees, not without some kind of pleasure. These are studied and digested deaths. But to the end that Cato only may furnish the whole example of virtue, Montaigne, had he had to represent him in his supreme station, would have shown him tearing out his bloody bowels rather than with his sword in his hand, as the statuaries of his time did. This second murder was much more furious than the first.