Imagine then, Marcia, that your father, whose influence over you was as great as yours over your son, no longer in that frame of mind in which he deplored the civil wars, or in which he forever proscribed those who would have proscribed him, but in a mood as much more joyful as his abode now is higher than of old, is saying, as he looks down from the height of heaven, "My daughter, why does this sorrow possess you for so long? why do you live in such ignorance of the truth, as to think that your son has been unfairly dealt with because he has returned to his ancestors in his prime, without decay of body or mind, leaving his family flourishing? Do you not know with what storms Fortune unsettles everything? how she proves kind and compliant to none save to those who have the fewest possible dealings with her? Need I remind you of kings who would have been the happiest of mortals had death sooner withdrawn them from the ruin which was approaching them? or of Roman generals, whose greatness, had but a few years been taken from their lives, would have wanted nothing to render it complete? or of men of the highest distinction and noblest birth who have calmly offered their necks to the stroke of a soldier's sword? Look at your father and your grandfather: the former fell into the hands of a foreign murderer: I allowed no man to take any liberties with me, and by abstinence from food showed that my spirit was as great as my writings had represented it. Why, then, should that member of our household who died most happily of all be mourned in it the longest? We have all assembled together, and, not being plunged in utter darkness, we see that with you on earth there is nothing to be wished for, nothing grand or magnificent, but all is mean, sad, anxious, and hardly receives a fractional part of the clear light in which we dwell. I need not say that here are no frantic charges of rival armies, no fleets shattering one another, no parricides, actual or meditated, no courts where men babble over lawsuits for days together, here is nothing underhand, all hearts and minds are open and unveiled, our life is public and known to all, and that we command a view of all time and of things to come. I used to take pleasure in compiling the history of what took place in one century among a few people in the most out-of-the-way corner of the world: here I enjoy the spectacle of all the centuries, the whole chain of events from age to age as long as years have been. I may view kingdoms when they rise and when they fall, and behold the ruin of cities and the new channels made by the sea. If it will be any consolation to you in your bereavement to know that it is the common lot of all, be assured that nothing will continue to stand in the place in which it now stands, but that time will lay everything low and bear it away with itself: it will sport, not only with men—for how small a part are they of the dominion of Fortune?—but with districts, provinces, quarters of the world: it will efface entire mountains, and in other places will pile new rocks on high: it will dry up seas, change the course of rivers, destroy the intercourse of nation with nation, and break up the communion and fellowship of the human race: in other regions it will swallow up cities by opening vast chasms in the earth, will shake them with earthquakes, will breathe forth pestilence from the nether world, cover all habitable ground with inundations and destroy every creature in the flooded world, or burn up all mortals by a huge conflagration. When the time shall arrive for the world to be brought to an end, that it may begin its life anew, all the forces of nature will perish in conflict with one another, the stars will be dashed together, and all the lights which now gleam in regular order in various parts of the sky will then blaze in one fire with all their fuel burning at once. Then we also, the souls of the blest and the heirs of eternal life, whenever God thinks fit to reconstruct the universe, when all things are settling down again, we also, being a small accessory to the universal wreck,¹³ shall be changed into our old elements. Happy is your son, Marcia, in that he already knows this."

NewPP limit report Parsed by mw‐web.eqiad.main‐788455d9bc‐sj7qf Cached time: 20260405035252 Cache expiry: 75600 Cache expiry source: Module:PD‐US (os.date(%d)) Reduced expiry: true Complications: [vary‐page‐id, vary‐revision‐sha1, no‐toc] CPU time usage: 0.110 seconds Real time usage: 0.175 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 757/1000000 Revision size: 83064/2097152 bytes Post‐expand include size: 8475/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 1008/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 9/100 Expensive parser function count: 2/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 12760/5000000 bytes Lua time usage: 0.057/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 1529062/52428800 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 1/500 Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 151.278 1 -total 48.13% 72.809 1 Template:Header 20.49% 30.995 1 Template:PD-US 16.67% 25.212 3 Template:C 7.90% 11.958 3 Template:Center/s 6.01% 9.089 1 Template:Dropinitial 4.33% 6.551 8 Template:Optional_style 3.22% 4.874 1 Template:Reflist 3.14% 4.743 1 Template:SmallTOC 1.58% 2.392 1 Template:Larger Saved in parser cache with key enwikisource:pcache:1160952:|#|:idhash:canonical and timestamp 20260405035252 and revision id 10797162. Rendering was triggered because: page_view