Dream of Scipio and Stoic Paradoxes

give to the crowd. Do not place hope for your affairs in human rewards. Virtue herself, by her own charms, must draw you to true glory. As for what others say about you, let them see to it themselves, yet they will speak nonetheless. But all that talk is confined to the narrow limits of these regions you see, and it was never eternal for anyone, and it is overwhelmed by the death of men and extinguished by the oblivion of posterity. When he had said these things, I said, "Indeed, Africanus, if there lies before those who have served their country well a kind of path to the access of heaven, since from boyhood I have walked in the footsteps of my father and your own and have not been lacking in your honor, now, with such a great reward set before me, I will strive much more vigilantly." And he replied, "Strive indeed, and hold this: you are not mortal, but this body is. For you are not what this form indicates, but the mind of each one is the person, not that figure which can be pointed at with a finger. Know, therefore, that you are a god, if indeed a god is that which lives, which senses, which remembers, which provides, which so rules, moderates, and moves this body over which it is set, as that prince, the eternal God, moves this world. And as the eternal God moves the mortal world, so an everlasting soul moves the fragile body. For that which is always in motion is eternal. But that which imparts motion to something else, and which itself is moved by something else, must have an end to its life when its motion ends. Therefore, only that which moves itself, because it never abandons itself, never ceases to be moved; indeed, it is the source and origin of motion for all other things that move. But an origin has no beginning. For all things arise from an origin, but the origin itself cannot be born from anything else. For if the origin were to be generated from elsewhere, it would no longer be an origin. And if it never has a beginning, it never ends. For an origin, once extinguished, can neither be reborn from another nor create anything else from itself, since it is necessary that all things arise from an origin. Thus it happens that the origin of motion comes from that which is moved by itself. This can neither be born nor die, otherwise the whole heaven and all nature would necessarily collapse and cease to be, nor would it find any force by which it might be set in motion from an initial impulse."