12.  How quickly all things disappear,—­in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them.  What is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapory fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are,—­all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe.  To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child.  This, however, is not only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the purposes of nature.  To observe too how man comes near to the Deity, and by what part of him, and when this part of man is so disposed+ (vi. 28).

13.  Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet[A] says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbors, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him, and to reverence it sincerely.  And reverence of the daemon consists in keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men.  For the things from the gods merit veneration for their excellence; and the things from men should be dear to us by reason of kinship; and sometimes even, in a manner, they move our pity by reason of men’s ignorance of good and bad; this defect being not less than that which deprives us of the power of distinguishing things that are white and black.

    [A] Pindar, in the Theaetetus of Plato.  See xi. 1.

14.  Though thou shouldest be going to live three thousand years and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.  The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same.  For the present is the same to all, though that which perish is not the same;+[A] and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment.  For a man cannot lose either the past or the future:  for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him?  These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years, or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same.  For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.