Such were the leading topics that were employed in that beautiful literature of “Consolations,” which the academic Crantor is said to have originated, and which occupies so large a place in the writings of Cicero, Plutarch, and the Stoics. Cicero, like all the school of Plato, added to these motives a very firm and constant reference to the immortality of the soul. Plutarch held the same doctrine with equal assurance, but he gave it a much less conspicuous position in his “Consolations,” and he based it not upon philosophical grounds, but upon the testimonies of the oracles, and upon the mysteries of Bacchus.(281) Among the Stoics the doctrine shone with a faint and uncertain light, and was seldom or never adopted as a motive. But that which is most impressive to a student who turns from the religious literature of Christianity to the pagan philosophies, is the complete absence in the latter of all notion concerning the penal character of death. Death, according to Socrates,(282) either extinguishes life or emancipates it from the thraldom of the body. Even in the first case it is a blessing, in the last it is the greatest of boons. “Accustom yourself,” said Epicurus, “to the thought that death is indifferent; for all good and all evil consist in feeling, and what is death but the privation of feeling?”(283) “Souls either remain after death,” said Cicero, “or they perish in death. If they remain they are happy; if they perish they are not wretched.”(284) Seneca, consoling Polybius concerning the death of his brother, exhorts his friend to think, “if the dead have any sensations, then my brother, let loose as it were from a lifelong prison, and at last enjoying his liberty, looks down from a loftier height on the wonders of nature and on all the deeds of men, and sees more clearly those divine things which he had so long sought in vain to understand. But why should I be afflicted for one who is either happy or is nothing? To lament the fate of one who is happy is envy; to lament the fate of a nonentity is madness.”(285)