The visit to scipio's is an inside job. Narrative breaks through the epistolary manner, to take us inside the chosen ‘historical exemplum’ for a whole rounded composition. In the next Letter, ‘Cato’ will shrink back into the usual parameters, as a momentary concretization of the argument (87.9–10). Whereas we were safely guided past the exterior of vatia's Siren seduction, to shake us from comatose lethargy, we begin here, as we mean to go on, right there:

This is a place to be still, to lie there and think, to let this shrine infuse, implant, its spiritual message into our own inwards, into us (iacens). Our whereabouts? We are now in the grave; that is all the location we get and all we need: the ambience permeates this writing with holy miasma, as religious atmosphere pens today's unorthodox praeparatio mortis (adoratis manibus eius et ara). Let us pray – for once the Letters take a positive turn, trusting to the legacy of (Roman Republican) Tradition for solid bedrock. For all that Seneca will shoot off shafts of morally energizing satire at the decadence of (Roman Imperial) Modernism. This is no place for the mannered self-ironization of our visit to seneca's gardening, not the moment to run into superannuated staff and wallow in senile sentimentality.