[11] ATTICUS: I recognize that grove and the oak tree of the people of Arpinum:

I have read about them often in the Marius. If that oak tree survives, this is surely it; it's certainly old enough.

QUINTUS: It survives, Atticus, and it will always survive: its roots are in the imagination. No farmer's cultivation can preserve a tree as long as one sown in a poet's verse.

ATTICUS: How so, Quintus? What sort of thing do poets sow? In praising your brother, I suspect that you are looking for praise for yourself.

[2] QUINTUS: Be that as it may, as long as Latin literature has a voice, there will always be an oak at this spot called “Marius's,” and as Scaevola says about my brother's Marius, “it will grow old for countless generations.” But perhaps you think that your beloved Athens has been able to keep the olive tree on the Acropolis alive forever, or that the palm that they show today on Delos is the same as the tall and slender tree that Homer's Ulysses says that he saw there: many other things in many places last longer in recollection than they could in nature.