Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle. Plato’s Apology is basically a transcript of Socrates speech/defense at his trial where he was found guilty and sentenced to death by drinking a cup of poison (hemlock). The following is an exert from that speech (towards the end of about 25 print pages). Source material here. Emphasis mine.
I say this because death is one of two things: either it is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness for the person who has died, or, according to the sayings [legomena], there is some kind of a change [meta-bolē] that happens—a relocation [met-oikēsis] for the soul [psūkhē] from this place [topos] to another place [topos]. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, |40d but a sleep like the sleep of someone who sees nothing even in a dream, death will be a wondrous gain [kerdos]. For if a person were to select the night in which he slept without seeing anything even in a dream, and if he were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life in a better and more pleasant way than this one, I think that any person—I will not say a private individual [idiōtēs], but even the great king— |40e will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is a gain [kerdos]; for the sum total of time is then only a single night. But if death is the journey [apo-dēmiā] to another place [topos], and, if the sayings [legomena] are true [alēthē], that all the dead are over there [ekeî], then what good [agathon], O jurors, [dikastai], can be greater than this? |41a If, when someone arrives in the world of Hādēs, he is freed from those who call themselves jurors [dikastai] here, and finds the true [alētheîs] judges [dikastai] who are said to give judgment [dikazein] over there [ekeî]—Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aiakos and Triptolemos, and other demigods [hēmi-theoi] who were righteous [dikaioi] in their own life—that would not be a bad journey [apo-dēmiā], now would it? To make contact with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer—who of you would not welcome such a great opportunity? Why, if these things are true [alēthē], let me die again and again.
I saw this video once by Peter Kreeft about the 10 books everyone should read before they die, but by the end of the video, pretty much right at the beginning, he said, laughing with the enjoyment of his own wit, and I paraphrase, “That’s impossible, their are 26 books. One of the books was the above, and as one of the shortest books on the list, one of the first ones I read. The best part was at the end, I thought, Socrates’s thoughts about death because of a recent brush with mortality painfully elaborated previously, which was in fact not the terminal event feared, but now there is the something else that although certainly not imminent, is more imminently so than the expected more natural causes.
I thought of this portion of Socrates defense three weeks ago when on my back in the basement bedroom, feeling my consciousness loosening. Yes. I had the time to wonder which it was, believing, hoping for the relocation to heaven, pretty much resigned to a lengthy unpleasant stint in Purgatory; but, what if it was the other, the deep dreamless sleep; perhaps that would not awful and if Socrates thought it a good, why would my feeble mind have the hubris to seem otherwise? The deep sleep would mitigate the pain of Purgatory; still, the ecstasy of Heaven (extrapolating that from the Olympian gods of Plato’s time) would be infinitely better, something dying for again and again.