ty when the
dying man can comfort himself with his own praise. No one dies too soon
who has finished the course of perfect virtue. I myself have known many
occasions when I have seemed in danger of immediate death; oh! how I
wish it had come to me! for I have gained nothing by the delay. I had
gone over and over again the duties of life; nothing remained but to
contend with fortune. If reason, then, cannot sufficiently fortify us
to enable us to feel a contempt for death, at all events let our past
life prove that we have lived long enough, and even longer than was
necessary; for notwithstanding the deprivation of sense, the dead are
not without that good which peculiarly belongs to them, namely, the
praise and glory which they have acquired, even though they are not
sensible of it. For although there be nothing in glory to make it
desirable, yet it follows virtue as its shadow; and the genuine
judgment of the multitude on good men, if ever they form any, is more
to their own praise than of any real advantage to the dead. Yet I
cannot say, however it may be received, that Lycurgus and Solon have no
glory from their laws, and from the political constitution which they
established in their country; or that Themistocles and Epaminondas have
not glory from their martial virtue.

XLVI. For Neptune shall sooner bury Salamis itself with his waters than
the memory of the trophies gained there; and the Boeotian Leuctra shall
perish sooner than the glory of that great battle. And longer still
shall fame be before it deserts Curius, and Fabricius, and Calatinus,
and the two Scipios, and the two Africani, and Maximus, and Marcellus,
and Paulus, and Cato, and Laelius, and numberless other heroes; and
whoever has caught any resemblance of them, not estimating it by common
fame, but by the real applause of good men, may with confidence, when
the occasion requires, approach death, on which we are sure that even
if the chief good is not continued, at least no evil is. Such a man
would even wish to die while in prosperity; for all the favors that
could be heaped on him would not be so agreeable to him as the loss of
them would be painful. That speech of the Lacedaemonian seems to have
the same meaning, who, when Diagoras the Rhodian, who had himself been
a conqueror at the Olympic games, saw two of his own sons conquerors
there on the same day, approached the old man, and, congratulating him,
said, "You should die now, Diagoras, for no g