Page:Cicero - de senectute (on old age) - Peabody 1884.djvu/97

ence from the things which I did in this body. Believe then that I am the same being, even though you do not see me at all. The fame of illustrious men would not remain after their death, if the souls of those men did nothing to perpetuate their memory. Indeed, I never could be persuaded that souls live while they are in mortal bodies and die when they depart from them, nor yet that the soul becomes void of wisdom on leaving a senseless body; but I have believed that when, freed from all corporeal mixture, it begins to be pure and entire, it then is wise. Moreover, when the constitution of man is dissolved by death, it is obvious what becomes of each of the other parts; for they all go whence they came: but the soul alone is invisible, alike when it is present in the body and when it departs. You see nothing so nearly resembling death as sleep. Now in sleep souls most clearly show their divineness;^[1] for when they are thus relaxed and free, they foresee the future. From this we may understand what they will be when they have entirely released themselves from the bonds of the body. Therefore, if these things are so, reverence me as a divine being.^[2] If, however, the soul is going to perish with the body, you still, revering

1. Latin, divinitatem suam.
2. Latin, sic me colitote, ut deum, referring, as I suppose, not to an apotheosis after the manner of the Roman Emperors, but to the divineness (divinitas) ascribed to the soul in prescient dreams, which, as has just been said, prefigure what the soul will become in dying.