Somnium Scipionis, Part VI

“But thus, Scipio, as your grandfather here, as I who begot you, cultivate justice and loyalty, which is both great in the case of parents and relatives, and the greatest in the case of the fatherland. This life is the way into heaven and into this meeting of those who have already lived their lives and, loosened from the body, inhabit that place which you see” (but that was a circle shining with very bright whiteness among the flames), “which you, as you have learned from the Greeks, call the Milky Way.” From which the others seemed to me, surveying all things, clear and marvelous. But those stars were what we have never seen from this place, and those magnitudes of them all were what we have never suspected them to be, from which the least was that which, farthest from the heaven, closest from the lands, was shining with a foreign light. But the spheres of the stars were easily conquering the magnitude of the earth. Now truly the earth itself seemed so small to me that it made me sorry for our empire, with which we touch as if a point of it.