Literature resists time. Seneca, Epistles 2.21.5-6

What is literature? A tool for extending memory, staving off the power of time to destroy lessons learned by ancestors whom we cannot meet, except in its words.

Quod Epicurus amico suo potuit promittere, hoc tibi promitto, Lucili: habebo apud posteros gratiam, possum mecum duratura nomina educere. Vergilius noster duobus memoriam aeternam promisit et praestat:

        fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt,

        nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo,

        dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum

        accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.

Quoscumque in medium fortuna protulit, quicumque membra ac partes alienae potentiae fuerunt, horum gratia viguit, domus frequentata est, dum ipsi steterunt: post ipsos cito memoria defecit. Ingeniorum crescit dignatio nec ipsis tantum honor habetur, sed quidquid illorum memoriae adhaesit excipitur.

What Epicurus was able to promise his friend, that I now promise to you, Lucilius: I shall find favor among folk yet to be, and so I can carry with me here a few names that shall outlast the end of our generation. Our own Vergil (†) shows the way, promising eternal memory to two heroes, and redeeming his pledge:

        Blessed pair of perished friends!

        In my songs your lives won't end.

        While Aeneas' home yet peopled stands

        On Capitol's peak, in Roman hands

        So long shall your memory be

        And never time will set it free.

Meanwhile, all those ancients whom fortune thrust into public prominence became members and pieces of a power strange to them: their houses flourished, full of folk as long as they lived, but immediately after them, all memory of their existence failed. The reputation of those captured by literature, in contrast, keeps growing over time. Nor is honor the only fruit it yields: whatever scraps of personal recollection manage to cling to the written word shall escape time's ravages with it.

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(†) Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE) was a Roman citizen from Andes, near Mantua, whose equestrian family sent him off to study rhetoric and philosophy in many different places (notably the Epicurean school of Siro in Naples). His poetry copied Greek models. The passage quoted here is from the Aeneid (9.447-450), which Vergil wrote in the manner of Homer. It memorializes the death of Nisus and his young admirer Euryalus, two companions of the mythical Roman founder Aeneas who perish during a night raid on the camp of the Rutuli, native Italians who resist Aeneas' plan to settle down in their vicinity.