The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and powers are non-essential properties, counted virtually as things indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest. In all the rest he can wear an actor’s mask: those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:
Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res
[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast. The mask is ripped off: reality remains.]*
That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the others; it is (says one of the Ancients)† the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart.
I note that several men by their death have given a good or bad reputation to their entire life. Scipio, Pompey’s father-in-law, redeemed by a good death the poor opinion people had had of him until then. And when asked which of three men he judged most worthy of honour, Chabrias, Iphicrates or himself, Epaminondas replied, ‘Before deciding that you must see us die.’ (Indeed Epaminondas would be robbed of a great deal if anyone were to weigh his worth without the honour and greatness of his end.)
In my own times three of the most execrable and ill-famed men I have known, men plunged into every kind of abomination, died deaths which were well-ordered and in all respects perfectly reconciled: such was God’s good pleasure.
Some deaths are fine and fortunate. I knew a man‡ whose thread of life was progressing towards brilliant preferment when it was snapped; his end was so splendid that, in my opinion, his great-souled search after honour held nothing so sublime as that snapping asunder: the goal he aimed for he reached before he had even set out; that was more grand and more glorious than anything he had wished or hoped for. As he fell he surpassed the power and reputation towards which his course aspired.
When judging another’s life I always look to see how its end was borne: and one of my main concerns for my own is that it be borne well – that is, in a quiet and muted manner.
* Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 135.
* Plutarch, tr. Amyot, Dicts notables des Lacedaemoniens, p. 211C.
† Ludovico Sforza, ousted in 1500, spent eight years in the dungeon at Loches; Mary Stuart (widow of Francis II of France) was beheaded in 1587.
‡ Lucretius, V, 1233. (The fasces and axes were Roman symbols of State.)
* Macrobius, Saturnalia, II, vii.
* Lucretius, III, 57.
† Seneca, Epist. moral., XXIV and XXVI.
‡ Etienne de La Boëtie.
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