I. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that in Mexico, across the Ocean, they are keeping the day they call the Day of the Dead. It is counted among that people's chief festivals, and in 2008 UNESCO entered it in its list of what they call intangible cultural heritage. For several days the memory of the departed is honoured with music and the brightest colours. That is all that is reported. Who arranged the parades, who met the cost, is not said. Nor is it your concern.

II. Do not despise it. Your ancestors also honoured the dead on fixed days: at the Parentalia, when wine and bread and violets were carried to the tombs; at the Lemuria, when the father of the house threw black beans over his shoulder at midnight. This is pietas: paying the debt to those from whom you received life, name and custom. A people that begins to forget its dead begins to forget itself. They sing; you are silent. Which of you remembers better is an open question.

III. But consider what memory is. Those who sing and walk the streets today honour their dead; in a few years they will be honoured themselves; then those who honoured them will perish too, and no one will be left who holds the names. Memory follows memory, as wave follows wave; the procession never ends, only the actors change.

IV. Think of the age of Vespasian. People married, raised children, fell ill, died, feasted, mourned their dead and went to the tombs on fixed days. Where are they now? Where are those who mourned them? Think of the wax masks carried at the funerals of the nobility, so that the ancestors themselves seemed to walk in the procession. Most of the houses that carried them are extinct. Wax melts; the name is scraped from under the inscription.

V. That list, in which the customs of peoples are written down so that they will not perish, is an honourable thing. But a list too is matter. Archives burn, languages change, those who read them die. What is kept by the agreement of men is abandoned by the same agreement. Do not look in a register for what is found only in nature.

VI. Take away the pomp and see what is left. The colours are ground earth and the juice of plants; the music is struck air; the procession is people walking. You yourself, as Epictetus used to say, are a little soul carrying a corpse. Alexander of Macedon and his mule-driver, once dead, came to the same place: either they were taken back into the same reason of the world, or they were scattered alike among the atoms. Choose whichever you like; there is no difference between the purple and the tunic.

VII. "The universe is transformation; life is opinion." Do the dead feel whether they are honoured with tears or with flutes? They feel nothing. The rite serves the living: it reminds them that they will die. What those people do in public for three days with music, you scarcely do in silence in camp over years. In this they surpass you.

VIII. What, then, is to be done? Think of death not once a year but every morning. Then rise to the work of a man: read the letters from the frontier, hear the petitions, forgive the ignorant, do nothing for glory. No one will remember you; it is enough if you have done your duty while the light lasts. They call up the dead once a year; count yourself among the dead every day, and rise.