Death is the fate of us all, and we do not know when it will come upon us. Furthermore, we all have the same allotment in the hereafter, where there is no memory, no thought, no wisdom, and no knowledge. It is a great deal like the Greek afterlife. In fact, the line about it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion also reminds me of Achilles in the Odyssey, where he tells Odysseus he would rather be the lowest of peasants on earth than the greatest among the dead in the underworld. Much like Gilgamesh portrays death as abduction, Ecclesiastes portrays it as capture in a snare, an evil net. The suddenness of death equally features in both as well. Once one comes to terms with these aspects of death--its inevitability, its suddenness (it
