Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, On the Nature of the Gods, and On the Commonwealth

These things perhaps you dread, and therefore look on death as an eternal evil.

VI. A. Do you take me to be so imbecile as to believe in such things?
M. What, do you not believe them?
A. Not in the least.
M. I am sorry to hear that.
A. Why, I ask?
M. Because I could have been very eloquent in speaking against them.
A foolish belief. A. And who could not on such a subject? Or what trouble is it to refute these monstrous inventions of the poets and painters? original: "Pictoribus atque poetis / Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas." — Horace, Art of Poetry. Translation: "Painters and poets have always had an equal right to dare to do anything [they please]."
M. And yet you have books of philosophers full of arguments against these very things.
A waste of time. A. A great waste of time, truly! For who is so weak as to be concerned about them?
M. If, then, there is no one miserable in the infernal regions, there can be no one there at all.
A. I am altogether of that opinion.
M. Where, then, are those you call miserable? Or what place do they inhabit? For if they exist at all, they must be somewhere.
A. I, indeed, am of opinion that they are nowhere.
M. Then they have no existence at all.
A. Even so, and yet they are miserable for this very reason: that they have no existence.
M. I had rather now have you afraid of Cerberus than speak thus inaccurately.
A. In what respect?
M. Because you admit that someone exists whose existence you deny in the same breath. Where now is your sagacity? When you say anyone is miserable, you say that he who does not exist, does exist.
A. I am not so absurd as to say that.