habits this city, and are far behind the others, who are
unwilling to fulfill their duties at all, yet for this reason I praise
you the more and I am heartily grateful that you have shown yourselves
obedient and are helping to replenish the fatherland. It is by lives so
conducted that the Romans of later days will become a mighty multitude.
We were at first a mere handful, but when We had recourse to marriage and
begot children we came to surpass all mankind not only in manliness but
in populousness. This we must remember and console the mortal element of
our being with an endless succession of generations like torches. Thus
the one gap which separates us from divine happiness may through relays
of men be filled by immortality. It was for this cause most of all that
that first and greatest god who fashioned us divided the race of mortals
in twain, rendering one half of it male and the other female, and added
love and the compulsion of their intercourse together, making their
association fruitful, that by the young continually born he might in
a way render mortality eternal. Even of the gods themselves some are
believed to be male, the rest female: and the tradition prevails that
some have begotten others and certain ones have been born of others. So,
even among them, who need no such device, marriage and child-begetting
have been approved as noble. [-3-] You have done right, then, to imitate
the gods and right to emulate your fathers, that, just as they begot you,
you may also bring others into the world. Just as you deem them and
name them ancestors, others will regard you and address you in similar
fashion. The undertakings which they nobly achieved and handed down to
you with glory you will hand on to others. The possessions which they
acquired and left to you will leave to others sprung from your own loins.
Surely the best of all things is a woman who is temperate, domestic,
a good house-keeper, a rearer of children; one to gladden you when in
health, to tend you when sick; to be your partner in good fortune, to
console you in misfortune; to restrain the frenzied nature of the youth
and to temper the superannuated severity of the old man. Is it not a
delight to acknowledge a child bearing the nature of both, to nurture and
educate it, a physical image and a spiritual image, so that in its growth
you yourself live again? Is it not most blessed on departing from life to
leave behind a successor to and inheritor of one's