lius Scipio, and yours, Caius Laelius, men of the highest renown and my very dear friends, are living, and are living the only life that truly deserves to be called life. Indeed, while we are shut up in this prison of the body, we are performing a heavy task laid upon us by necessity; for the soul, of celestial birth, is forced down from its supremely high abode, and, as it were, plunged into the earth, a place uncongenial with its divine nature and its eternity. I believe, indeed, that the gods disseminated souls, and planted them in human bodies, that there might be those who should hold the earth in charge, and contemplating the order of celestial beings, should copy it in symmetry and harmony of life. I was led to this belief, not only by reason and argument, but by the pre-eminent authority of the greatest philosophers. I learned that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, almost our fellow-countrymen,[1] who used to be called Italian philosophers, never doubted that we had souls that emanated from the universal divine mind. I was impressed, also, by what Socrates, whom the oracle of Apollo pronounced the wisest of men, taught with regard to the immortality of souls, on the last
- ↑ Pythagoras was probably a native of Samos, but after extensive travel in the East established himself and gathered disciples at Crotona, a city founded by Greek colonists in Magna Graecia, or Southern Italy. Hence his followers bore the name of the Italian or Italic school, the only school of philosophy, it is believed, that ever seemed indigenous—though this not native—in Italian soil.
