Artifacts of a Life Once Lived

"You are born mortal, you have given birth to mortal beings and have you yourself, a decaying and slack body filled with illnesses, hoped that you had borne something stable and eternal in such a weak material?... The saying inscribed at the site of the Pythian oracle, "Know Yourself", means this: what is a human being? A vessel that can be broken in pieces by any shock at all, by any blow at all. No great storm is required to make you crack; you break up whenever you bump into anything at all. What is a human being? A weak and fragile body, naked, provided by nature with no weapons, needing the help of others, exposed to all the ill-treatments of fate... Woven out of weak and flabby elements, handsome only in the external outlines of the figure; incapable of bearing cold, heat and exertions... Do we then find death something surprising, the death that is the work of one single sobbing breath? The human being considers undying and eternal things in his heart and makes plans for grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but sometimes death overcomes him while he is yet sketching his wide-reaching schemes. And what we call a 'great age' is the course of only a few years."

- Epictetus (50 - 120 AD)

In The Religious Context of Early Christianity, 362.

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