About this passageTwo sentences, and an exercise rather than a consolation: the instruction is to keep the worst possibilities in view deliberately and daily, not to wait until one of them arrives. Exile meant losing your city, your standing and your household at once, so the pair names the largest ordinary loss and the final one. The reason given is not courage but proportion — what the practice is claimed to prevent is grovelling, and wanting anything too much.
Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly; and you will never entertain an abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
In plainer words
Keep death, and losing everything, and whatever else looks unbearable, in front of you every day — death most of all. Do that and you will never have a small thought, and you will never want anything so badly that it owns you.
A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.