heir
very bodies sought to obstruct the march of the Carthaginians; nor
your grandfather Lucius Paulus,[20] who by his death atoned for the
temerity of his colleague in the disgraceful defeat at Cannae; nor
Marcus Marcellus,[21] whose corpse not even the most merciless foe
suffered to go without the honor of sepulture; but that our legions,
as I have remarked in my Antiquities, have often gone with cheerful
and undaunted mind to that place from which they believed that they
should never return. Shall, then, well-instructed old men be afraid of
that which young men, and they not only ignorant, but mere peasants,
despise? On the whole, as it seems to me indeed, a satiety of all
pursuits causes a satiety of life. There are pursuits peculiar to
boyhood; do therefore young men regret the loss of them? There are
also some of early youth; does settled age, which is called middle
life, seek after these? There are also some of this period; neither
are they looked for by old age. There are some final pursuits of old
age; accordingly, as the pursuits of the earlier parts of life fall
into disuse, so also do those of old age; and when this has taken
place, satiety of life brings on the seasonable period of death.

Indeed, I do not see why I should not venture to tell you what I
myself think concerning death; because I fancy I see it so much the
more clearly in proportion as I am less distant from it. I am
persuaded that your fathers, Publius Scipio and Caius Laelius, men of
the greatest eminence and very dear friends of mine, are living, and
that life too which alone deserves the name of life. For while we are
shut up in this prison of the body, we are fulfilling, as it were, the
function and painful task of destiny; for the heaven-born soul has
been degraded from its dwelling-place above, and, as it were, buried
in the earth, a situation uncongenial to its divine and immortal
nature. But I believe that the immortal gods have shed souls into
human bodies, that beings might exist who might tend the earth, and by
contemplating the order of the heavenly bodies might imitate it in the
manner and regularity of their lives. Nor have reason and argument
alone influenced me thus to believe, but likewise the high name and
authority of the greatest philosophers. I used to hear that Pythagoras
and the Pythagoreans, who were all but our neighbors, who were
formerly called the Italian philosophers, had no doubt that we
possess souls derived fr