The Elder of Days — Robert Reginald

They hide among us, these near-immortals, and they go by names like William Shakespeare and John Donne and Napoleon Bonaparte. They're immune to most diseases, heal rapidly from injury, and age so slowly that their life-spans are encompassed by the passage of millennia. Only accident and injury, murder and mayhem, or suicide, can end their existences. Those who do survive, those who have learned how to live their long lives to the fullest, call themselves The Elders.