[147] For he would not take a deadly poison unless the occasion compelled him very strongly to depart from life, as it might urge him to depart from his country. And at all events it is plain, that unmixed wine is a poison, which is the cause, if not of death, at least of madness, and why may we not pronounce madness to be death, since by it the most important thing in us dies, namely, the mind? But it appears to me that a man would without the slightest hesitation choose (if a choice was permitted him), that death which separates and disunites the soul and the body as a lesser evil in preference to that greater one—the alienation of the mind.