Journal: My sig

First, is a quote, of course, I wish I could write like that. There is no place in the .sig to name the author or work, or in fact to put a "those" before "virtues" (as I more accurately translated it at first). It's from Margerite Yourcenar, the first woman in the Académie Française. The book is "Memoirs d'Hadrien" (Memories of Hadrian). I copy from Amazon:

"Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, this work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and his contemporaries, both friends and enemies. Marguerite Yourcenar reconstructs Hadrian's arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, and his gradual reordering of a war-torn world."

Well, one of these meditations is the one I copied. I read it in the original french, liked it too much (having been hit in life several times by those "great, general views"), and much later wrote it as my .sig. So I may not remember it word by word, by the idea is that. So "Rome", of course, is the city but more to the point the emperorship.