the state was displayed by its mourning at his death.... The authority of the ancients has more weight with me, either that of our own ancestors, who paid such sacred honors to the dead, which surely they would not have done if they thought those honors did in no way affect them, or that of those who once lived in this country, and enlightened, by their institutions and instructions, Magna Graecia[30] (which now indeed is entirely destroyed, but then was flourishing), or of him who was pronounced by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of men, who did not say first one thing and then another, as is generally done, but always the same; namely, that the souls of men are divine, and that when they have departed from the body, a return to heaven is opened to them, and the speediest to the most virtuous and just. This same opinion was also held by Scipio; for he indeed, a very few days before his death, as if he had a presentiment of it, when Philus and Manilius were present, and many others, and you also, Scaevola, had gone with me, for three days descanted on the subject of government; of which discussion the last was almost entirely on the immortality of souls, which he said he had learned in sleep through a vision from Africanus. If this be the fact, that the spirit of the best man most easily flies away in death, as from the prison-house and chains of the body, whose passage to the gods can we conceive to have been readier than that of Scipio? Wherefore, to be afflicted at this his departure, I fear, would be the part rather of an envious person than of a friend.... But yet I so enjoy the recollection of our friendship that I seem to have lived happily because I lived with Scipio, with whom I had a common anxiety on public and private affairs, and with whom my life both at home and abroad was associated, and there existed that, wherein consists the entire strength of friendship, an entire agreement of inclinations, pursuits, and sentiments. That character for wisdom, therefore, which Fannius a little while ago mentioned does not so delight me, especially since it is undeserved, as the hope that the recollection of our friendship will last forever. And it is the more gratifying to me because scarcely in the history of the world are three or four pairs of friends mentioned by name; and I indulge in the hope that the friendship of Scipio and Laelius will be remembered....