One of ancient Greece’s standard truths was memorably expressed by the chorus of Sophocles’s play Oedipus at Colonus: “Never to have been born is best; but if we must see the light, the next best is quickly returning whence we came. When youth departs, with all its follies, who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them?”

In line with this thinking, an ancient Greek proverb said: “Whom the gods love dies young.” In 1865, author George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) referred to this proverb in a letter to the grieving parents of a young woman who had died at the age of 20:

“I don’t know whether you strongly share, as I do, the old belief that made men say the gods loved those who died young. It seems to me truer than ever, now that life has become more complex and more and more difficult problems have to be worked out.

“Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all...”