And what is begotten of the darkness of death--who can tell ?" When, after saying this, the Emperor had remained for some time silent, the youth asked him: "But if the sunrise teaches you nothing concerning the future why should you so often break your night's rest and climb the mountain to see it ?" "Why?
Why ?" repeated Hadrian, slowly and meditatively, stroking his grizzled beard; then he went on as if speaking to himself: "That is a question which reason fails to answer, before which my lips find no words; and, if I had them at my command, who among the rabble would understand me?
Such questions can best be answered by means of parables.

Those who take part in life are actors, and the world is their stage.

He who wants to look tall on it wears the cothurnus, and is not a mountain the highest vantage ground that a man can find for the sole of his foot?
Kasius there is but a hill, but I have stood on greater giants than he, and seen the clouds rise below me, like Jupiter on Olympus." "But you need climb no mountains to feel yourself a god," cried Antinous; "the godlike is your title--you command and the world must obey.

With a mountain beneath his feet a man is nearer to heaven no doubt than he is on the plain." "Well ?" "I dare not say what came into my mind." "Speak out." "I knew a little girl who when I took her on my shoulder would stretch out her arms and exclaim, 'I am so tall!' She fancied that she was taller than I then, and yet was only little Panthea." "But in her own conception of herself, it was she who was tall, and that decides the issue, for to each of us a thing is only that which it seems to us.

It is true they call me godlike, but I feel every day, and a hundred times a day, the limitations of the power and nature of man, and I cannot get beyond them.