terview and talked with him on the subject
of his embassy, while Marius was sick. But one Caius Piso,[142] an
historian, says that Marius, while walking about with some friends
after supper, fell to talking of the incidents of his life, beginning
with his boyhood, and after enumerating his many vicissitudes of
fortune, he said that no man of sense ought to trust fortune after
such reverses; upon which he took leave of his friends, and keeping
his bed for seven successive days, thus died. Some say that his
ambitious character was most completely disclosed during his illness
by his falling into the extravagant delusion that he was conducting
the war against Mithridates, and he would then put his body into all
kinds of attitudes and movements, as he used to do in battle, and
accompany them with loud shouts and frequent cheers. So strong and
unconquerable a desire to be engaged in that war had his ambitious and
jealous character instilled into him; and therefore, though he had
lived to be seventy years of age, and was the first Roman who had been
seven times consul and had made himself a family, and wealth enough
for several kings, he still bewailed his fortune, and complained of
dying before he had attained the fulness and completion of his
desires.

XLVI. Now Plato, being at the point of death, felicitated himself on
his daemon[143] and his fortune, first that he was born a human being,
then that he was a Greek, and neither a barbarian nor an irrational
animal; and besides all this, that his birth had fallen on the time
when Socrates lived. And indeed it is said that Antipater[144] of
Tarsus, in like manner, just before his death, when recapitulating the
happiness that he had enjoyed, did not forget his prosperous voyage
from Rome to Athens, inasmuch as he considered every gift of
favourable fortune as a thing to be thankful for, and preserved it to
the last in his memory, which is to man the best storehouse of good
things. But those who have no memory and no sense, let the things that
happen ooze away imperceptibly in the course of time; and
consequently, as they hold nothing and keep nothing, being always
empty of all goodness, but full of expectation, they look to the
future and throw away the present. And yet fortune may hinder the
future, but the present cannot be taken from a man; nevertheless, such
men reject that which fortune now gives, as something foreign, and
dream of that which is uncertain: and it is natura