“All boundaries will be sundered,” he foresees, in the same ecstatic tone he had used in Consolation to Marcia. “Whatever Nature has split into separate parts will be merged together.… Waters will converge from East and from West. A single day will serve to bury the whole human race. All that fortune’s favor has preserved for so long, all that it has raised above the rest—the noble, the glorious, the kingdoms of great peoples—all will plunge alike into the abyss.” The twilight of the world, it seemed to Seneca, was coinciding with the twilight of his own life. Soon, he foresaw, virtue and vice
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