“I want to tell you something which brought me no small comfort; perhaps this same thought can lessen your grief. When I was returning from Asia, sailing from Aegina toward Megara, I began to look at the regions all around me. Behind me was Aegina, in front was Megara, on the right Piraeus, on the left Corinth. These were once flourishing towns, but now they lay lifeless and ruined before my eyes. I began to think to myself: “Ah! Are we little men, whose lives are necessarily too brief, indignant if one of us dies or is killed, when in one place so many corpses of towns lie abandoned? Please pull yourself together, Servius, and remember that you were born a mortal man.” Believe me, I was strengthened considerably by this thought.” Servius Rufus in a letter to Cicero
