Author: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9781230341743

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... * for living well and honorably;1 and if you should advance further, you need no more grieve than farmers do when the loveliness of spring-time hath passed, that summer and autumn have come. For spring represents the time of youth, and gives promise of the future fruits; the remaining seasons are intended for plucking and gathering in those fruits. Now the harvest of old age, as I have often said, is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured. In truth every thing that happens agreeably to nature is to be reckoned among blessings. What, however, is so agreeable to nature as for an old man to die? which even is the lot of the young, though nature opposes and resists. And thus it is that young men seem to me to die, just as when the violence of flame is extinguished by a flood of water; whereas old men die, as the exhausted fire goes out, spontaneously, without the exertion of any force; and as fruits when they are green are plucked by force from the trees, but when ripe and mellow drop off, so violence takes away their lives from youths, maturity from old men; a state 1" Glory is the portion of virtue, the sweet reward of honorable toils, the triumphant crown which covers the thoughtf'nl head of the disinterested patriot, or the dusty brow of the victorious warrior. Elevated by so sublime a prize, the man of virtue looks down with contempt on all the allurements of pleasure, and all the menances of danger. Death itself loses its terrors when he considers that its dominion extends only over a part of him, and that, in spite of death and time, the rage of the elements, and the endless vicissitudes of human affairs, he is assured of an immortal fame among all the sons of men. There is surely a Being who presides over...