1If there is any place for the shades of the dutiful, if, as the wise hold, great souls do not perish with the body, may you rest in peace, and call us and your household from feeble longing and womanish lamentations to the contemplation of your virtues, which it is not right to mourn or bewail. 2Let us honour you rather with admiration, with immortal praises and, if nature permits, by resembling you: that is true honour, that is the devotion of all who are most closely bound to you. 3This too I would enjoin on his daughter and his wife, so to venerate the memory of a father, of a husband, that they ponder all his deeds and words in their minds, and embrace the form and figure of his soul rather than of his body, not because I think we should forbid the images that are shaped in marble or bronze, but because, like the faces of men, the likenesses of those faces are frail and mortal, while the form of the mind is eternal, and you can keep it and express it not through another's material and art, but only through your own character.
4Whatever we have loved in Agricola, whatever we have admired, remains and will remain in the minds of men, through the eternity of ages, in the fame of his deeds; 4for oblivion will bury many of the ancients as if inglorious and ignoble: Agricola, told of and handed down to posterity, will survive.