I remember
what Lucius Brutus did, who was killed while defending his country; or
the two Decii, who spurred their horses to a gallop and met a voluntary
death; or M. Atilius Regulus, who left his home to confront a death of
torture, rather than break the word which lie had pledged to the enemy;
or the two Scipios, who determined to block the Carthaginian advance
even with their own bodies; or your grandfather Lucius Paulus, who
paid with his life for the rashness of his colleague in the disgrace at
Cannae; or M. Marcellus, whose death not even the most bloodthirsty of
enemies would allow to go without the honour of burial. It is enough to
recall that our legions (as I have recorded in my _Origins_) have
often marched with cheerful and lofty spirit to ground from which they
believed that they would never return. That, therefore, which young
men--not only uninstructed, but absolutely ignorant--treat as of no
account, shall men who are neither young nor ignorant shrink from in
terror? As a general truth, as it seems to me, it is weariness of all
pursuits that creates weariness of life. There are certain pursuits
adapted to childhood: do young men miss them? There are others suited
to early manhood: does that settled time of life called "middle age" ask
for them? There are others, again, suited to that age, but not looked
for in old age. There are, finally, some which belong to Old age.
Therefore, as the pursuits of the earlier ages have their time for
disappearing, so also have those of old age. And when that takes place,
a satiety of life brings on the ripe time for death.

21. For I do not see why I should not venture to tell you my personal
opinion as to death, of which I seem to myself to have a clearer vision
in proportion as I am nearer to it. I believe, Scipio and Laelius, that
your fathers--those illustrious men and my dearest friends--are still
alive, and that too with a life which alone deserves the name. For as
long as we are imprisoned in this framework of the body, we perform a
certain function and laborious work assigned us by fate. The soul, in
fact, is of heavenly origin, forced down from its home in the highest,
and, so to speak, buried in earth, a place quite opposed to its divine
nature and its immortality. But I suppose the immortal gods to have sown
souls broadcast in human bodies, that there might be some to survey
the world, and while contemplating the order of the heavenly bodies to
imitate it in