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