The Pompeii mosaic, 1,400 years before Tarot, asserts death's
universal sovereignty, as does any memento mori. However, it was
designed to emphasize a fundamental equality between the most
disparate members of society. Ultimate equality was a precept of
the Stoics. Arguments can be made that virtue is the summum
bonum and achievable by all, that only the wise are truly free,
or that slaves and nobles ultimately derive from the same stock.
These all point toward egalitarian conclusions, but death is the
only irrefutable example of universal equality. The emblem from
Wither, two centuries after Tarot, makes the same point and just
as emphatically, while Van Veen's allegorical emblem has more in
common with the trump cycle itself. Countless works of art and
literature, song and drama, reminded people of death, and most
of them took pains to allude to the universality of it. This
might take the form of an Everyman character, perhaps the three
nobles of the Three Living and Three Dead, perhaps the King of
Life in