1This, then, is the part that remains for you; 1this act is left, on this you must labour: to set the commonwealth in order, and to enjoy it yourself, above all, in the greatest tranquillity and peace: then, if you wish, when you have both paid your country what you owe and satisfied nature herself with fullness of living, say that you have lived long enough. 1For what at all is this very 'long', in which there is some end? 1When that end comes, all past pleasure counts for nothing, because none will come afterwards. 1And yet that spirit of yours was never content with these narrow limits that nature has given us for living; it has always burned with love of immortality.
28Nor indeed must this be thought your life which is bounded by body and breath: that, I say, that is your life which will thrive in the memory of all ages, which posterity will nourish, which eternity itself will always guard. 28To this you must devote yourself, to this you must display yourself; it indeed has long had much to marvel at; 28now it awaits also something to praise. 28Posterity will surely be astounded as it hears and reads of your commands, provinces, the Rhine, the Ocean, the Nile, countless battles, incredible victories, monuments, shows and triumphs. 29But unless this city is established by your counsels and institutions, your name will merely wander far and wide; it will have no stable seat and no fixed home.
29Among those too who will be born there will be, as there has been among us, great disagreement, since some will extol your achievements to the sky with praise, while others perhaps will find something wanting, and that the greatest thing of all, unless you quench the fire of civil war by your country's safety, so that the one may seem to have been the work of fate, the other of wisdom. 29Serve, then, those judges who many ages hence will judge you, and indeed, I rather think, more impartially than we; 29for they will judge both without love and without partiality, and again without hatred and without envy. 30And even if that will not concern you then, as some falsely think, it certainly concerns you now to be such a man that no oblivion will ever obscure your praises.