Memento mori

Memento mori, “remember that you will die”, is a Latin formula of uncertain origin, later attached to Christian devotion and to the painted skulls of the seventeenth century. The Stoic texts do not contain the two words, but they contain the practice, and Seneca comes closest to the phrase. In Letter 26 he quotes Epicurus’s advice to think on death and adds, in Richard Gummere’s translation of §10, that he who has learned to die has unlearned slavery.

Epictetus makes it a daily exercise. Enchiridion XXI, in Elizabeth Carter’s 1758 wording, asks that death and exile be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, with a stated result: the reader will then never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet any thing. The remembrance is a corrective to the scale of one’s desires, not a meditation on decay.

Marcus Aurelius compresses it into three sentences at Meditations, IV, 17 (Long, 1862): do not act as if you had ten thousand years; death hangs over you; while you live and while it is in your power, be good. Elsewhere he uses it to cut short anger (Meditations, XI, 18) and the desire for fame (Meditations, IV, 3), always with the same turn: because the time is short, the present act matters.

In all three authors the thought is paired with action. It is never a reason to withdraw, and never presented as morbid; Seneca insists that the person who has rehearsed death is thereby free. It is the counterpart, for the end of life, of the rehearsal of evils, premeditatio malorum, that the same authors recommend for its course.