CITIES1 and monuments made of stone, if you compare them with our life, are enduring; if you submit them to the standard of Nature’s law they are perishable, since Nature brings all things to destruction and recalls them to the state from which they sprang. For what that mortal hands have made is ever immortal? The seven wonders of the world and all the works, far more wonderful than these, that the ambition of later years has reared, will some day be seen leveled to the ground. So it is — nothing is everlasting, few things are even long-lasting; one thing perishes in one way, another in another, though the manner of their passing varies, yet whatever has beginning has also an end.
Some there are who threaten even the world with destruction, and (if you think that piety admits the belief) this cosmos, which contains all the works of gods and men, will one day be scattered and plunged into the ancient chaos and darkness. What folly, then, for anyone to weep for the lives of individuals, to mourn over the ashes of Carthage and Numantia and Corinth and the fall of any other city, mayhap loftier than these, when even this cosmos will perish though it has no place into which it can fall; what folly for anyone to complain that Fate, though she will some day dare so great a crime, has not spared even him! Who is of such haughty and overweaning presumption as to wish that he and his dear ones alone be excepted from this law of Nature that brings all things to their end, and to exempt some one household from the destruction that threatens even the world itself? A man, therefore, will find the greatest comfort in the thought that what has befallen himself was suffered by all who were before him and will be suffered by all who come after him; and Nature has, it seems to me, made universal what she had made hardest to bear in order that the uniformity of fate might console men for its cruelty.