Sleep embraced me, deeper sleep than usual [than was accustomed to] and Africanus showed himself

in that form which to me was more familiar from his portrait mask than him himself. Which when I recognized, I truly shuddered however I searched for whether he himself and my father Paulus Aemilius was alive and others which we had thought to be dead. On the contrary, in truth, he said, they are living who flew awy from the chains of bodies so as if they flew away from prison; your life of which you speak is death. Why dont you see your father Paul coming toward you? As I saw him, I poured forth an abundance of tears. However, he embraced me, and also kissing me preventing me from crying. And also as soon as, with tears gone, I began to be able to speak, I beg you, I said, most august and best father, since this is life, as I hear Africanus say, why do I wait on land? Why not hasten here to come to you? Thus is not the way, he said. For if not this god, whose temple this is, everything which you behold (makes hand gesture), has freed you from the concerns of your body, he does not open the entrance here for you, for men are created in accordance to this law, which protects that globe, who you would see in the center of this temple, which is called the Earth, which spirit was given to those men from those eternal fires which you call the stars and constellations Because of which thing both by you, Publius, and by all dutiful men the soul must remain in guard of the body, and not without his command by which the spirit was given to you (pl.) from the life of men that must depart, lest you seem to have fled from the duty assigned to humans from god Cherish justice and devotion, which although is important in parents and relatives, surely is greatest in the fatherland. That life is a road into the sky and into this company of them, who have now lived and set free from their bodies, reside in that place which you, as you have taken from the Greeks, call the Milky Way. And he, You truly thus shall consider that you are not mortal, but the body, and for you are not that which your form declares to your friends, but it is the mind of any man that is any man, it is not the figure, which is able to be shown by the finger. You shall know therefore that you are a god; since it is a god who is strong, who feels, who remembers, who foresees, who rules and controls and moves that body, which he is in the command of as that foremost god rules the universe.