For whoever can clearly apprehend that which is as manifest as the light--that when both soul and body are consumed, and there is a total destruction, then that which was an animal becomes nothing--will clearly see that there is no difference between a Hippocentaur, which never had existence, and King Agamemnon, and that M.Camillus is no more concerned about this present civil war than I was at the sacking of Rome, when he was living.
XXXVIII.

Why, then, should Camillus be affected with the thoughts of these things happening three hundred and fifty years after his time?
And why should I be uneasy it I were to expect that some nation might possess itself of this city ten thousand years hence?
Because so great is our regard for our country, as not to be measured by our own feeling, but by its own actual safety.
Death, then, which threatens us daily from a thousand accidents, and which, by reason of the shortness of life, can never be far off, does not deter a wise man from making such provision for his country and his family as he hopes may last forever; and from regarding posterity, of which he can never have any real perception, as belonging to himself.
Wherefore a man may act for eternity, even though he be persuaded that his soul is mortal; not, indeed, from a desire of glory, which he will be insensible of, but from a principle of virtue, which glory will inevitably attend, though that is not his object.

The process, indeed, of nature is this: that just in the same manner as our birth was the beginning of things with us, so death will be the end; and as we were noways concerned with anything before we were born, so neither shall we be after we are dead.

And in this state of things where can the evil be, since death has no connection with either the living or the dead?
The one have no existence at all, the other are not yet affected by it.
They who make the least of death consider it as having a great resemblance to sleep; as if any one would choose to live ninety years on condition that, at the expiration of sixty, he should sleep out the remainder.

The very swine would not accept of life on those terms, much less I.Endymion, indeed, if you listen to fables, slept once on a time on Latmus, a mountain of Caria, and for such a length of time that I imagine he is not as yet awake.