Death Is Nothing To Us Since

From Book III of De Rerum Natura, this is Lucretius's elegant reformulation of the argument Epicurus made in the Letter to Menoeceus. The Epicurean argument runs: death is the permanent cessation of all sensation; harm requires a subject capable of experiencing it; therefore death cannot harm the person who has died. Where the letter states the logic directly, Lucretius here gives it its most memorable poetic form — and adds the "symmetry" implication: our non-existence before birth was no hardship, so our non-existence after death should be equally untroubling.