Awake, then! and see thy dream as it is, in comparison with that erewhile it seemed to thee.
"And for me, especially, it were well to mind those many mutations of empire in time past; therein peeping also upon the future, which must needs be of like species with what hath been, continuing ever within the rhythm and number of things which really are; so that in forty years one may note of man and of his ways little less than in a thousand.

Ah! from this higher place, look we down upon the ship-wrecks and the calm! Consider, for example, how the world went, under the emperor Vespasian.

They are married and given in marriage, they breed children; love hath its way with them; they heap up riches for others or for themselves; they are murmuring at things as then they are; they are seeking for great place; crafty, flattering, suspicious, waiting upon the death of others:--festivals, business, war, sickness, dissolution: and now their whole life is no longer anywhere at all.
Pass on to the reign of Trajan: all things continue the same: and that life also is no longer anywhere at all.

[205] Ah! but look again, and consider, one after another, as it were the sepulchral inscriptions of all peoples and times, according to one pattern .-- What multitudes, after their utmost striving--a little afterwards! were dissolved again into their dust.
"Think again of life as it was far off in the ancient world; as it must be when we shall be gone; as it is now among the wild heathen.

How many have never heard your names and mine, or will soon forget them! How soon may those who shout my name to-day begin to revile it, because glory, and the memory of men, and all things beside, are but vanity--a sand-heap under the senseless wind, the barking of dogs, the quarrelling of children, weeping incontinently upon their laughter.
"This hasteth to be; that other to have been: of that which now cometh to be, even now somewhat hath been extinguished.