Book 4

1.1. You have long wished to see your granddaughter and me together, after so long a separation. We are both glad that you wish it, and I assure you the wish is mutual.

1.2. For we too are held by an extraordinary longing for you, which we shall not put off any longer. Indeed we are already strapping up our little bundles, and shall hurry on as fast as the conditions of the road allow.

1.3. There will be one delay, but a brief one: we shall turn aside into Tuscany — not to set our eyes upon the land and the estate, for that can be postponed, but to discharge a necessary obligation.

1.4. There is a town near my estates, named Tifernum Tiberinum, which adopted me as its patron when I was still almost a boy — with a zeal as great as its judgement was small. It celebrates my arrivals, is distressed by my departures, and rejoices in my honours.

1.5. To repay the kindness — for to be outdone in affection is most shameful — I have built a temple there at my own expense, and since it is now ready, to put off its dedication any longer would be impious.

1.6. So we shall be there on the day of the dedication, which I have decided to mark with a public feast. We shall perhaps stay on the following day as well, but then we shall press all the harder along the road itself.

1.7. May it only be granted to us to find you and your daughter in good health! For we shall surely find you cheerful, if you receive us safe and sound. Farewell.

2.1. Regulus has lost his son — the one misfortune of which he was undeserving, though I am not sure he counts it a misfortune at all. The boy was sharp but unsteady in his nature, though he might still have followed the right path, had he not taken after his father.

2.2. Regulus had emancipated him, so that he might inherit from his mother; and once he was emancipated — for so people commonly spoke of it, judging by the man's character — Regulus courted him with a foul and unnatural pretence of fatherly indulgence. It seems incredible — but think of Regulus.

2.3. Yet now that he has lost the boy he mourns him to the point of madness. The boy had many ponies, both broken and unbroken; he had dogs, large and small; he had nightingales, parrots, and blackbirds: all of these Regulus slaughtered around the pyre.

2.4. It was not grief, but a display of grief. People flock to him in remarkable numbers. They all detest him, they hate him; yet, as though they approved of him, as though they loved him, they hurry to him and crowd about him — and, to put my feeling briefly, in their pains to win Regulus's favour they imitate Regulus.

2.5. He keeps to himself across the Tiber, in gardens where he has covered a vast tract of ground with immense colonnades and lined the bank with statues of himself — being, as he is, lavish in the depths of his greed, and vainglorious in the depths of his disgrace.

2.6. So he plagues the city in the most unhealthy season of the year, and counts it a consolation that he plagues it. He says he means to take a wife — this too, like everything else, perversely.

2.7. You will soon hear of the wedding of a man in mourning, the wedding of an old man — the one too soon, the other too late. You ask how I prophesy this?

2.8. Not because he says so himself, than whom nothing is more false, but because it is certain that Regulus will do whatever ought not to be done. Farewell.

3.1. That you were twice consul, in the manner of the men of old; that as proconsul of Asia you were such as scarcely one or two were before you or have been since — for your own modesty will not let me say "as no one was"; that in holiness, in authority, and in age too you are foremost in the state — all this is indeed venerable and admirable. Yet I admire you even more in your hours of leisure.

3.2. For to season such severity with an equal charm, and to add so much courtesy to the greatest dignity, is no less difficult than it is great. This you achieve, both by the wonderful sweetness of your conversation and, above all, by your pen.

3.3. For when you speak, that honey of the old man of Homer seems to flow from your lips, and what you write the bees themselves seem to fill with flowers and weave together. Such, at least, was my own feeling when I lately read your Greek epigrams and your mimiambics.

3.4. How much humanity, how much grace there is in them! How sweet they are, how full of love, how pointed, how true! I thought I held Callimachus, or Herodas, or anyone better than they — and yet neither of those men perfected or even touched on both forms.

3.5. Can a Roman speak Greek so well? Heaven knows, I would not call Athens itself so Attic. In short: I envy the Greeks, that you chose to write in their tongue. For there is no need to guess what you can express in your native speech, when with this grafted and borrowed one you have brought such splendid works to perfection. Farewell.

4.1. I am exceedingly fond of Varisidius Nepos, a man industrious, upright, and eloquent — which last counts for most with me. He is also bound by close kinship to Gaius Calvisius, my comrade and your friend; for he is his sister's son.

4.2. I beg you to make him more distinguished, both for his own sake and his uncle's, with a six-month tribunate. You will put me in your debt, you will put our Calvisius in your debt, and him too, whom you will judge no less worthy a debtor than ourselves.

4.3. You have conferred many benefits on many men; I would venture to maintain that you have never placed any one better, and only one or two as well. Farewell.

5.1. They say that Aeschines, when the Rhodians asked it of him, read aloud his own speech, and then that of Demosthenes, both to loud applause.

5.2. That this should have happened with the writings of such great men does not surprise me, since most learned men have lately listened to a speech of mine over two days with this same zeal, this same approval, this same effort, although no comparison on either side, no contest as it were, was there to kindle their attention.

5.3. For the Rhodians were roused both by the very excellence of the speeches and by the spur of comparison, whereas my speech won approval without the help of any rivalry. Whether it was deserved you will know when you have read the book, whose great length forbids me to preface it with a longer letter.

5.4. For we ought at least to be brief where we can, so that there may be more excuse for the length to which we have drawn out the book itself — though not beyond the importance of the case. Farewell.

6.1. My Tuscan estate has been stripped bare by hail; from the region across the Po I hear of the greatest abundance, but of prices to match, so that only my Laurentine place brings me any return.

6.2. There, indeed, I own nothing but the roof and a garden, and beyond that, sand at once; yet only that brings me any return. For there I write a great deal, and cultivate by my studies not a field, which I do not have, but my very self; and already I can show you there, as in other places a full barn, so there a full bookcase.

6.3. So you too, if you long for sure and fruitful estates, should buy something on this shore. Farewell.

7.1. I have often told you that there is force in Regulus. It is remarkable how he carries through whatever he sets his mind to. He has resolved to mourn his son: he mourns as no one else does. He has resolved to make as many statues and portraits of him as possible: he sets every workshop to the task, fashioning the boy in colour, in wax, in bronze, in silver, in gold, in ivory, in marble.

7.2. He himself lately gathered a vast audience and recited a book on the boy's life — on the life of a boy, but he recited it all the same. He had the same book copied a thousand times over and circulated throughout all Italy and the provinces. He wrote to the town councils in their public capacity, asking that one of their number with the strongest voice be chosen to read it to the people: it was done.

7.3. This force — or whatever else one should call the determination to obtain whatever one wishes — had he turned it to better ends, how much good he might have done! Yet there is less force in good men than in bad, and as ignorance breeds boldness, but reflection brings hesitation, so modesty cripples honest natures, while audacity confirms perverse ones.

7.4. Regulus is the proof. He has a weak chest, a confused delivery, a stammering tongue, the slowest invention, no memory — nothing at all, in fact, but a deranged talent; and yet by his shamelessness and by that very frenzy he has come so far as to be accounted an orator.

7.5. And so Herennius Senecio wonderfully turned that saying of Cato about the orator against him, reversing it: "An orator is a bad man unskilled in speaking." Indeed Cato himself did not describe the true orator half so well as Senecio described Regulus.

7.6. Have you any way of returning thanks for such a letter? You have, if you write to tell me whether any one of my friends in your town — or even you yourself — has read aloud this lamentable book of Regulus's in the forum, like a mountebank, "raising his voice," as Demosthenes puts it, "exulting and bawling at the top of his throat."

7.7. For it is so absurd that it can rouse laughter more readily than a groan: you would think it written not about a boy, but by a boy. Farewell.

8.1. You congratulate me on having received the augurship — and rightly so: first, because it is a fine thing to obtain even in lesser matters the favourable judgement of so great a prince; and next, because the priesthood itself, ancient and sacred as it is, has this further distinction, that it cannot be taken from a man while he lives.

8.2. For other honours, though almost equal in dignity, are taken away just as they are bestowed; over this, fortune has power only so far as that it may be given.

8.3. To me, indeed, this too seems worth congratulation, that I have succeeded that distinguished man Julius Frontinus, who for these last several years used to nominate me among the priests on the day of nomination, as though co-opting me into his own place — a thing the outcome has now so confirmed that it seems no mere chance.

8.4. You, as you write, are pleased by my augurship above all because Marcus Tullius was an augur. For you are glad that I tread in the footsteps of the man whom I long to rival in my studies.

8.5. But would that, as I attained the same priesthood and the consulship even much younger than he did, so I might in old age at least attain some part of his genius!

8.6. But of course the things that lie in human power have fallen to me as to many others; that other gift is as hard to win as it is too much even to hope for, since it can be given only by the gods. Farewell.

9.1. In these last few days Julius Bassus pleaded his cause — a man much tried by misfortune, and made famous by his adversities. Under Vespasian he was accused by two private individuals; the case was referred to the Senate, where he hung long in suspense, until at last he was acquitted and vindicated.

9.2. He feared Titus, as a friend of Domitian, and was banished by Domitian; recalled by Nerva and allotted Bithynia, he returned from it as a defendant, accused no less keenly than he was loyally defended. The votes were varied, but the more numerous inclined to the milder side.

9.3. Pomponius Rufus, a ready and vehement man, conducted the prosecution against him; Rufus was followed by Theophanes, one of the provincial deputation, the firebrand of the accusation and its very origin.

9.4. I replied. For Bassus had charged me to lay the foundations of the whole defence, to speak of his distinctions — which were great, both from the nobility of his birth and from his very perils;

9.5. to speak of the conspiracy of the informers, who made their living by it; to give the reasons why he had given offence to every most factious man, like that very Theophanes. He had also wished me to meet the charge by which he was most heavily pressed. For in other matters, however grave to hear, he deserved not merely acquittal but praise;

9.6. but this weighed upon him, that, being a simple and incautious man, he had accepted certain things from the provincials as a friend — for he had been quaestor in that same province. These the accusers called thefts and plunder, while he called them gifts. But the law forbids the acceptance even of gifts.

9.7. Here what was I to do? What path of defence was I to take? Deny it? I feared it would plainly look like theft, if I were afraid to admit it. Besides, to deny a manifest fact was to aggravate the charge, not to dispel it — especially since the defendant himself had left nothing intact for his advocates. For he had told many people, and even the prince, that he had accepted only small presents, and only at his birthday or the Saturnalia, and had given most of them away.

9.8. Was I then to ask for pardon? I would have cut the defendant's throat, by conceding that he had so far transgressed that he could not be saved except by pardon. Was I to defend it as rightly done? I would not have helped him, but only have shown myself shameless.

9.9. In this difficulty I resolved to hold a middle course; and I think I held it. Night broke off my pleading, as it often does a battle. I had spoken for three and a half hours, and an hour and a half remained to me. For since the prosecutor was by law allowed six hours and the defendant nine, the defendant had so divided the time between me and the one who was to speak after me, that I had five hours and he the rest.

9.10. The success of my pleading urged me to silence and a close; for it is rash not to be content with good fortune. Besides, I feared my bodily strength might fail me with the renewed effort, which is harder to take up again than to carry on unbroken.

9.11. There was also a danger that the remainder of my speech might suffer chill, as a thing laid aside, and weariness, as a thing taken up again. For just as torches keep their fire alive by constant shaking, but once let go are very hard to rekindle, so both the speaker's warmth and the hearer's attention are preserved by continuity, and grow faint with a break and, as it were, a relaxation.

9.12. But Bassus begged me with many entreaties, almost with tears, to fill out my full time. I gave way, and preferred his advantage to my own. It turned out well: I found the senators' spirits so alert, so fresh, that they seemed roused rather than sated by the earlier pleading.

9.13. I was followed by Lucceius Albinus, so aptly that our two speeches were thought to have had the variety of two and the coherence of one.

9.14. Herennius Pollio replied with force and weight, and then Theophanes again. For in this too, as in all else, he behaved with the utmost shamelessness, in that after two men, both of consular rank and eloquent, he claimed time for himself, and that more liberally too. He spoke on into the night, and even by night, with lamps brought in.

9.15. On the next day Homullus and Fronto pleaded for Bassus wonderfully; the fourth day was taken up with the evidence.

9.16. Baebius Macer, consul designate, gave it as his opinion that Bassus was liable under the law of extortion; Caepio Hispo, that judges should be appointed, his rank being preserved. Both were right.

9.17. "How can that be," you ask, "when their opinions were so different?" Because, plainly, it was consistent for Macer, looking to the letter of the law, to condemn one who had accepted gifts against the law; and Caepio, holding that the Senate is permitted — as indeed it is — both to soften the laws and to strengthen them, not without reason granted pardon for a deed that, though forbidden, was not unprecedented.

9.18. The opinion of Caepio prevailed; indeed, as he rose to give it, he was greeted with the applause usually reserved for those resuming their seats. From this you may judge with what unanimity it was received when he had said it, since it was so well liked when he merely seemed about to speak.

9.19. Yet, both in the Senate and in the city at large, men's judgements were divided into two camps. For those whom Caepio's opinion pleased blame Macer's as rigid and harsh; while those who favoured Macer's call the other lax and even inconsistent — for they say it is inconsistent to retain a man in the Senate to whom you have assigned judges.

9.20. There was also a third opinion. Valerius Paulinus, agreeing with Caepio, added this further: that a motion should be brought concerning Theophanes once he had reported on his embassy. For it was alleged that he had done many things in the prosecution that fell under the very law by which he had accused Bassus.

9.21. But this opinion, though it was wonderfully approved by the greatest part of the Senate, the consuls did not pursue.

9.22. Paulinus, however, won the repute both of justice and of consistency. When the Senate was dismissed, Bassus was greeted by a great throng of people, with great shouting and great joy. He had been made an object of favour by the renewed memory of his old dangers, by his name made known through his perils, and by the sad and squalid old age of his tall frame.

9.23. You shall have this letter meanwhile as a forerunner; you must wait for the full and weighty speech. You will wait a long while; for it must be revised, as so great a matter demands, with no light or hurried hand. Farewell.

10.1. You write to me that Sabina, who left us her heirs, nowhere ordered that her slave Modestus be set free, yet bequeathed him a legacy in these terms: "To Modestus, whom I have ordered to be free."

10.2. You ask what I think. I have consulted those skilled in the law. They all agree that his freedom is not owed, because it was not granted, nor the legacy, because she gave it to a slave of her own. But to me it seems a manifest mistake, and so I think we ought to do for Sabina what she herself believed she had written.

10.3. I am confident you will come round to my opinion, since you are accustomed most scrupulously to guard the will of the dead — which, to good heirs, to have understood is as good as law. For with us honour weighs no less than necessity does with others.

10.4. Let Modestus, then, remain in freedom with our consent, and enjoy his legacy as though she had taken every precaution most carefully. She did take precautions — she who chose good heirs. Farewell.

11.1. Have you heard that Valerius Licinianus is now teaching rhetoric in Sicily? You have not yet, I think, for the news is recent. A man of praetorian rank, he was lately reckoned among the most eloquent advocates; now he has sunk so low as to become an exile from a senator, a rhetorician from an orator.

11.2. And so he himself said in his opening, with grief and weight: "What sport you make, Fortune! For you turn senators into professors and professors into senators." In this saying there is so much gall, so much bitterness, that it seems to me he turned professor for the very purpose of saying it.

11.3. The same man, having entered wrapped in a Greek cloak — for those who have been forbidden water and fire have no right to the toga — once he had composed himself and looked round at his own dress, said: "I am going to declaim in Latin."

11.4. You will call this sad and pitiable; yet he deserved it, for staining these very studies with the crime of incest.

11.5. He did indeed confess to the incest, but it is uncertain whether because it was true, or because he feared graver penalties if he denied it. For Domitian was raging and seething, left without support amid a great storm of public hatred.

11.6. For when he had conceived a desire to bury alive Cornelia, the chief of the Vestals — thinking by such examples to make his age illustrious — he summoned the rest of the pontiffs, by right of his office as chief pontiff, or rather by the savagery of a tyrant and the license of a despot, not to the Regia but to his villa at Alba. And with no less wickedness than that which he made a show of avenging, he condemned her for incest, absent and unheard, although he himself had not only defiled his own brother's daughter by incest, but had even killed her; for she had died of a miscarriage while a widow.

11.7. The pontiffs were sent at once to see her buried and put to death. She, stretching out her hands now to Vesta, now to the other gods, cried out many things, but this most frequently of all: "Caesar thinks me unchaste — I, by whose performance of the rites he conquered and triumphed!"

11.8. Whether she said this in flattery or in mockery, out of confidence in herself or out of contempt for the prince, is uncertain. She kept saying it until she was led to her punishment — innocent, perhaps; certainly led as though she were innocent.

11.9. Indeed, as she was being let down into that underground chamber, and her robe caught as she descended, she turned and gathered it up; and when the executioner offered her his hand, she shrank from it and recoiled, rejecting the foul contact, as though from a body wholly chaste and pure, with a final act of holiness; and with every observance of modesty "she took great care to fall decently."

11.10. Moreover Celer, a Roman knight against whom the charge with Cornelia was brought, when he was being beaten with rods in the comitium, persisted in this one cry: "What have I done? I have done nothing."

11.11. Domitian was therefore burning with the disgrace both of cruelty and of injustice. He seized upon Licinianus, on the ground that he had hidden away a freedwoman of Cornelia's on his estate. Licinianus was warned in advance by those who had his interests at heart that, if he did not wish to suffer the comitium and the rods, he should take refuge in confession as in a pardon. He did so.

11.12. Herennius Senecio spoke on his behalf in his absence, something to this effect: "Patroclus lies dead." For he said: "From an advocate I have become a messenger: Licinianus has withdrawn."

11.13. This so pleased Domitian that his joy betrayed him, and he said: "Licinianus has acquitted us." He added too that his modesty should not be pressed; and he gave Licinianus leave, if he could, to snatch what he might from his property before it was confiscated, and granted him a mild exile as a kind of reward.

11.14. From this, however, he was afterwards moved by the clemency of the deified Nerva to Sicily, where he now teaches rhetoric and takes his revenge on fortune in his prefaces.

11.15. You see how obediently I do your bidding, in that I write so diligently not only the affairs of the city but those abroad as well, going back even to their beginnings. And indeed I supposed that you, being away at the time, had heard nothing of Licinianus except that he was banished for incest; for rumour reports the sum of things, not the order of them.

11.16. I deserve that you in turn should write me a full account of what goes on in your town and the neighbouring ones — for certain notable things do happen — and, in short, whatever you please, provided your letter is no shorter than mine. For I shall count not only the pages but the very lines and syllables. Farewell.

12.1. You love Egnatius Marcellinus, and often commend him to me as well; you will love and commend him the more, when you have learned of a recent act of his.

12.2. When he had gone out to his province as quaestor, and had lost, before the lawful date for the salary, the clerk who had fallen to him by lot, he realized that the money he had received to give to the clerk ought not to remain in his own hands, and so resolved.

12.3. Accordingly, on his return, he consulted Caesar, and then, on Caesar's advice, the Senate, as to what should be done with the salary. It was a small question, but a question nonetheless. The clerk's heirs claimed it for themselves, the prefects of the treasury for the public purse.

12.4. The case was pleaded; the advocate of the heirs spoke, and then that of the public, each very fittingly. Caecilius Strabo held that it should be paid into the treasury, Baebius Macer that it should be given to the heirs: Strabo prevailed.

12.5. Praise Marcellinus, as I did at once. For although it abundantly suffices him that he has the approval both of the prince and of the Senate, he will yet rejoice in your testimony as well.

12.6. For all who are led by glory and renown take a strange delight in approval and praise, even when it comes from their inferiors. And Marcellinus so respects you that he sets the highest value on your judgement.

12.7. To this is added that, if he learns his deed has reached so far as you, he cannot but rejoice in the range, the course, and the travels of his renown. For somehow or other men are more pleased by a fame that spreads wide than by one that is great. Farewell.

13.1. I am glad you have come safely to the city; you have come, if ever, now most longed-for by me. I myself shall stay on a few more days at my Tusculan place, to finish a little work I have in hand.

13.2. For I fear that, if I now slacken my effort at the very end, I shall hardly take it up again. Meanwhile, that nothing may be lost to my haste, I ask by this letter, as a forerunner, for what I am about to request in person. But first hear my reasons for asking, and then the request itself.

13.3. Lately, when I was in my native town, the son of a fellow townsman of mine, a boy still wearing the bordered toga, came to pay his respects. I said to him, "Are you studying?" He answered, "Yes." "Where?" "At Milan." "Why not here?" And his father — for he was with him, and had indeed brought the boy — said, "Because we have no teachers here."

13.4. "Why none? For it was greatly in your interest, you who are fathers" — and conveniently several fathers were listening — "that your children should learn here above all. For where could they more pleasantly stay than in their own town, where be more chastely kept than under their parents' eyes, where at less cost than at home?

13.5. How little, then, it would cost to hire teachers by a pooled fund, and to add to their fees what you now spend on lodgings, on travelling-money, on the things that must be bought abroad — for everything must be bought abroad! Indeed I, who have no children yet, am ready, for the sake of our community, as for a daughter or a parent, to give a third part of whatever it pleases you to contribute.

13.6. I would even promise the whole, were I not afraid that this gift of mine might one day be corrupted by canvassing, as I see happen in many places where teachers are hired at public expense.

13.7. There is one remedy against this fault: if the right of hiring be left to the parents alone, and to these same parents the scruple of judging rightly be added by the obligation of contributing.

13.8. For those who would perhaps be careless with another's money will certainly be careful with their own, and will take pains that none but a worthy man receive my money, since he will receive it from them as well.

13.9. So agree together, unite, and take from me a greater spirit, who long to have as large a sum as possible to contribute. You can render nothing more honourable to your children, nothing more pleasing to your homeland. Let those who are born here be educated here, and let them grow used, from earliest infancy, to love and frequent their native soil. And would that you might bring in such famous teachers that studies were sought here from the neighbouring towns, and that, as now your children go off to other places, so soon the children of others might flock to this one!"

13.10. I thought these things should be traced from their source, as it were, that you might know the better how grateful I should be if you took up what I lay upon you. And I lay it upon you, and beg you in proportion to the greatness of the matter, that out of the abundance of students who gather to you in admiration of your genius, you look about for teachers whom we may approach — yet on this condition, that I pledge my word to no one. For I leave everything free to the parents: let them judge, let them choose; I claim for myself only the care and the expense.

13.11. So if anyone be found who has confidence in his own talent, let him go there on these terms: that he carry nothing certain from here except his own confidence. Farewell.

14.1. You perhaps, as is your way, both demand and expect a speech; but I offer you my trifles, as it were some exotic and delicate ware.

14.2. You will receive with this letter my hendecasyllables, with which we beguile our leisure in the carriage, in the bath, at dinner.

14.3. In these I jest, play, love, grieve, complain, grow angry; I describe something now in a plainer, now in a loftier style; and by this very variety I try to bring it about that some things may please some readers, and a few perhaps all.

14.4. Yet if some of them strike you as a little too wanton, it will become your learning to reflect that those greatest and gravest men who wrote such things refrained not only from wantonness in the subject matter, but not even from plain words — things which I have avoided, not because I am more strait-laced (for how should I be?), but because I am more timid.

14.5. I know besides that the truest law of this kind of work is the one Catullus expressed: "For it befits the devoted poet to be chaste himself; his little verses need not be; which then at last have wit and charm if they are somewhat soft and not too modest."

14.6. How highly I value your judgement you may gather from this alone: that I chose to have everything weighed by you, rather than to have selected pieces praised. And indeed even the most pleasing things cease to seem so, when they have begun to be alike.

14.7. Besides, a wise and discerning reader ought not to compare different things with one another, but to weigh each by itself, and not to think a thing worse than another which is, in its own kind, perfect.

14.8. But why say more? For to excuse or commend trifles with a long preface is the most trifling thing of all. This one thing seems worth saying in advance: that I think of entitling these little nothings of mine "hendecasyllables," a title bound only by the law of the metre.

14.9. So, whether you prefer to call them epigrams, or idylls, or eclogues, or, as many do, little poems, or whatever else, you may; I guarantee only hendecasyllables.

14.10. From your candour I ask that you say to me what you are going to say of my little book to others; nor is what I ask hard. For if this little work of mine were either my best or my only one, perhaps it might seem harsh to say, "Find something else to do"; it is gentle and kindly to say, "You have something to do." Farewell.

15.1. If I do anything at all on principle, I certainly do this — that I love Asinius Rufus singularly. He is an excellent man, and most fond of good men. (For why should I not number myself too among the good?) The same man has embraced Cornelius Tacitus — you know what a man he is — in close intimacy.

15.2. So if you approve of us both, you must of necessity feel the same about Rufus too, since similarity of character is the strongest bond for knitting friendships together.

15.3. He has several children. For in this too he has discharged the duty of an excellent citizen, in that he chose to enjoy his wife's fruitfulness to the full, in an age when, to most people, even a single child is made burdensome by the rewards of childlessness. These rewards he scorned, and has even taken on the name of grandfather. For he is a grandfather — and that through Saturius Firmus, whom you will love as I do, if, as I do, you look more closely at him.

15.4. All this is to the point, that you may know what a numerous, what a populous household you will lay under obligation by a single favour; which I am led to ask first by my prayer, and then by a certain good omen.

15.5. For we wish and prophesy for you the consulship in the coming year: so your virtues, so the prince's judgement, bid us augur.

15.6. It happens, moreover, that in the same year the eldest of Rufus's children, Asinius Bassus, will be quaestor — a young man (I do not know whether to say what his father wishes me both to feel and to say, but the young man's modesty forbids) better than his father himself.

15.7. It is hard for you to believe me about one absent — though you are wont to believe everything — that there is in him so much industry, integrity, learning, talent, application, and finally memory, as you will discover by experience.

15.8. I could wish we had an age so fertile in good qualities that you ought to prefer others to Bassus: then I should be the first to urge and warn you to cast your eyes about and long deliberate whom you should choose above all.

15.9. But as it is — yet I will say nothing too arrogant of my friend; this only I say, that the young man is worthy to be taken by you, in the manner of our forefathers, into the place of a son. Wise men, such as you, ought to receive from the state such children, as it were, as we are wont to wish for from nature.

15.10. It will be becoming for you as consul to have a quaestor whose father was a praetor, whose kinsmen are of consular rank, to whom, by their own judgement, though he is still very young, he is already in turn an ornament.

15.11. So indulge my prayers, comply with my advice; and above all, if I seem to be in a hurry, forgive me: first, because affection commonly outruns its own wishes; and next, because in a state where everything is done, as it were, by those who seize it first, the things that await their lawful time come not ripe but late; in short, because the very anticipation of the things one longs to attain is itself a pleasure.

15.12. Let Bassus already revere you as consul, and you love him as your quaestor; and let us, who love both of you most dearly, enjoy a double joy.

15.13. For since we love you so, and Bassus so, that we shall help him, whosever quaestor he be, and your quaestor, whoever he be, in seeking honours with all our means, labour, and influence, it will be most pleasant to us if our affection has fallen upon the same young man for the sake both of my friendship and of your consulship — if, in short, you above all should come forward as a helper to my prayers, you whose vote the Senate would most gladly indulge and whose testimony it would most trust. Farewell.

16.1. Rejoice on my account, rejoice on your own, rejoice too on the public account: studies still keep their honour. Lately, when I was to speak before the Court of the Hundred, I could find no way to reach my place except from the tribunal, except through the judges themselves; so densely was everywhere else thronged.

16.2. Moreover, a certain well-dressed young man, his tunic torn, as often happens in a crowd, stood through it wrapped in his toga alone — and that for seven hours.

16.3. For so long I spoke, with great labour, but with greater fruit. Let us study, then, and not screen our own indolence behind that of others. There are those who will listen, there are those who will read; let us only work at something worthy of their ears, worthy of the page. Farewell.

17.1. You both advise and ask me to undertake the case of Corellia, who is absent, against Gaius Caecilius, consul designate. For your advising I thank you; of your asking I complain. For I ought to be advised, that I may know; I ought not to be asked to do what it would be most shameful for me not to do.

17.2. Should I hesitate to defend the daughter of Corellius? It is true that with the man against whom you summon me I have, if not plainly an intimacy, yet a friendship.

17.3. There is added the man's dignity, and this very honour for which he is destined, toward which I must show all the greater reverence, since I have already held it myself. For it is natural that each man should wish whatever he has himself attained to be esteemed as great as possible.

17.4. But when I reflect that I shall be defending the daughter of Corellius, all these considerations seem to me cold and empty. There rises before my eyes that man, than whom our age has produced none graver, none more upright, none more discerning; whom, having begun to love him out of admiration, I came — contrary to what usually happens — to admire the more after I had looked into him deeply.

17.5. For I did look into him deeply: nothing did he keep secret from me, nothing in jest or in earnest, nothing sad or glad.

17.6. I was a very young man, and already he showed me honour, and even — I will dare to say it — reverence, as to an equal. He was my supporter and witness in seeking honours, my escort and companion in entering upon them, my counsellor and guide in administering them; in short, in all my offices, though he was both feeble and aged, he was seen, as it were, young and strong.

17.7. How much he added to my reputation at home and in public, how much even with the prince!

17.8. For when it chanced that there was talk of promising young men in the presence of the emperor Nerva, and most were praising me, he held himself for a little in silence, which gave great weight to his words; and then, with that gravity you knew, he said: "I must praise Secundus more sparingly, for he does nothing except by my advice."

17.9. By this saying he granted me what it would have been excessive to ask for in prayer — that I do nothing but in the wisest way, since I did everything by the advice of a most wise man. Indeed, dying, he said to his daughter — she herself is wont to relate it — "I have gained you many friends through my longer life, but chiefly Secundus and Cornutus."

17.10. When I recall this, I understand that I must take pains that in no respect I seem to have failed the confidence of so far-sighted a man in me.

17.11. Therefore I will indeed stand by Corellia most readily, and will not refuse to incur offence; although I think I shall obtain not only pardon but even praise from that very man by whom — as you say — perhaps, as against a woman, a new suit is being raised, if I say these same things in my pleading (more fully and more amply, of course, than the narrow bounds of a letter allow), whether by way of excuse or even of commendation of myself. Farewell.

18.1. How can I better prove to you how greatly I admire your Greek epigrams than by the fact that I have tried to rival and render some of them in Latin? Yet for the worse. This happened first through the weakness of my talent, and next through the poverty — or rather, as Lucretius says, the destitution — of my native tongue.

18.2. But if these, which are both in Latin and my own, seem to you to have any grace, how much grace, do you suppose, lies in those which are both yours and brought forth in Greek! Farewell.

19.1. Since you are a model of family devotion, and loved your excellent and most affectionate brother with an equal love, and love his daughter as your own, showing her not only an aunt's affection but the presence of the father she has lost, I do not doubt it will be the greatest joy to you to learn that she is turning out worthy of her father, worthy of you, worthy of her grandfather.

19.2. She is most acute, most frugal; she loves me, which is a sign of her chastity. To this is added a zeal for letters, which she has conceived from her love of me. She has my little books, reads them again and again, even learns them by heart.

19.3. With what anxiety she is filled when I am about to plead, with what joy when I have pleaded! She arranges for people to report to her what assent, what applause I have stirred up, what outcome of the trial I have carried off. When I recite, she sits nearby, separated by a curtain, and drinks in our praises with the most eager ears.

19.4. She even sings my verses and sets them to the lyre, taught by no master of art, but by love, which is the best of teachers.

19.5. For these reasons I am led to the surest hope that our harmony will be lasting, and grow greater day by day. For she loves not my age or my body, which little by little decline and grow old, but my glory.

19.6. Nor does anything else become one reared by your hands, trained by your precepts, who has seen in your company nothing but what is holy and honourable, who, in short, has grown used to loving me through your commendation.

19.7. For since you revered my mother in a parent's place, you used from my boyhood to form me, to praise me, and to prophesy that I should be such a man as I now seem to my wife.

19.8. So we vie with each other in thanking you: I, because you have given her to me, and she, because you have given me to her, as though you had chosen us for each other. Farewell.

20.1. What I thought of each of your books I let you know as I read each one through; receive now what I judge of them all in general.

20.2. It is a work beautiful, strong, keen, sublime, varied, elegant, pure, well-figured, spacious too, and, to your great credit, far-ranging, in which you have sailed most widely on the sails both of your genius and of your grief; and each of these has been of help to the other.

20.3. For your genius added loftiness and magnificence to your grief, and your grief added force and bitterness to your genius. Farewell.

21.1. A sad and bitter fate, that of the Helvidian sisters! Both died in childbirth, each having borne a daughter.

21.2. I am moved with grief, yet I do not grieve beyond measure: so mournful it seems to me that fruitfulness has carried off girls of the highest honour in their earliest flower. I am distressed at the lot of the infants, who are orphaned of their parents at once and as they are born; distressed for their excellent husbands; distressed too on my own account.

21.3. For I love their father, though dead, most steadfastly, as my pleading and my books bear witness; to him now one of his three children survives, and, left desolate, he props and sustains a house but lately founded upon several supports.

21.4. Yet my grief finds great comfort, if fortune has preserved at least this one son strong and unharmed, and equal to that father, that grandfather. For his safety and his character I am the more anxious, because he has become the only one. You know the softness of my heart in love, you know my fears; so you will be the less surprised that I fear most for one of whom I hope most. Farewell.

22.1. I took part, being summoned to the council, in a judicial inquiry of our excellent prince. A gymnastic contest is celebrated among the people of Vienne under the terms of a certain man's will. Trebonius Rufinus, a distinguished man and a friend of mine, in his duumvirate saw to its abolition and suppression.

22.2. It was denied that he had acted on public authority. He pleaded his own cause no less successfully than eloquently. His pleading was commended by this, that, like a Roman and a good citizen, he spoke of his own affair with maturity and weight.

22.3. When the opinions were called for, Junius Mauricus — than whom there is no man firmer, none more truthful — said that the contest should not be restored to the people of Vienne; and he added, "I could wish it might be abolished at Rome too."

22.4. "Resolutely," you say, "and bravely." Indeed; but this is nothing new from Mauricus. The same man spoke no less bravely in the presence of the emperor Nerva. Nerva was dining with a few guests; Veiento was next to him, even reclining in his bosom: I have said everything when I have named the man.

22.5. The talk fell on Catullus Messalinus, who, robbed of his sight, had added to the evils of blindness a savage nature: he felt no fear, no shame, no pity; and so he was the more often hurled by Domitian, like a weapon which is itself blind and aimless, against every best man.

22.6. All were talking together over dinner of this man's villainy and bloody opinions, when the emperor himself said, "What do we suppose he would have suffered, if he were alive?" And Mauricus: "He would be dining with us."

22.7. I have digressed far, but gladly. It was decided that the contest should be abolished, which had corrupted the morals of the people of Vienne, as ours here corrupt those of all men. For the vices of the people of Vienne stay within their own borders, while ours range far and wide; and as in bodies, so in the body politic, the most dangerous disease is that which spreads from the head. Farewell.

23.1. I took great pleasure when I learned from our common friends that you, as befits your wisdom, both arrange and bear your leisure; that you live in the most delightful of places, exercise your body now on land, now at sea, discuss much, hear much, read much; and that, although you know a great deal, you yet learn something new every day.

23.2. So ought a man to grow old who has held the highest magistracies, commanded armies, and given himself wholly to the republic for as long as was fitting.

23.3. For we ought to devote the first part of life and the middle to our country, but the last to ourselves, as the very laws bid us, which restore to leisure the man advanced in years.

23.4. When will it be permitted me, when will it be honourable by reason of age, to imitate that example of most beautiful repose? When will my retirement receive the name not of indolence but of tranquillity? Farewell.

24.1. Lately, when I had spoken before the Court of the Hundred in a fourfold trial, the recollection came over me that as a young man I had pleaded likewise in a fourfold one.

24.2. My mind, as it does, ranged further: I began to reckon up which companions in labour I had had in this trial, which in that. I alone had spoken in both: so great are the changes wrought either by the frailty of our mortal state or by the mutability of fortune.

24.3. Some of those who pleaded then have died, others are in exile; for one, age and ill health have counselled silence; one of his own will enjoys a most blessed leisure; another commands an army; another the prince's friendship has withdrawn from civil duties.

24.4. About ourselves too, how many things have changed! By our studies we have advanced, by our studies we have been endangered, and again we have advanced.

24.5. The friendships of good men have helped us, the friendships of good men have harmed us, and again they help us. If you count the years, it is a brief time; if you count the changes of fortune, you would think it an age.

24.6. This may serve as a lesson to despair of nothing, to trust in nothing, since we see so many vicissitudes whirled round in so revolving a wheel.

24.7. It is my habit to share all my thoughts with you, and to warn you by the same precepts or examples by which I warn myself; and this was the reason for this letter. Farewell.

25.1. I had written to you that we must beware lest some abuse arise from the secret ballot. It has happened. At the recent elections, on certain ballots many jests, and even things foul to mention, were found; while on one, instead of the candidates' names, the names of their supporters were written.

25.2. The Senate flared up, and with a great shout invoked the prince's anger against the writer. He, however, escaped notice and remained hidden — perhaps was even among the indignant.

25.3. What do we suppose this man does at home, who, in so great a matter, at so solemn a time, plays so scurrilously — who, in short, is altogether witty and urbane and clever in the Senate?

25.4. So much license that confidence — "for who will know?" — adds to depraved natures. He called for the ballot, took the pen, bowed his head, fears no one, despises himself.

25.5. Hence these mockeries, fit for the stage and the platform. Where can you turn? What remedies can you seek out? Everywhere the vices are stronger than the remedies. "But these things will be the care of one above us," to whom this idle yet unbridled wantonness of ours adds much daily vigilance, much labour. Farewell.

26.1. You ask that I see to the revision and correction of my little books, which you have most zealously procured. I will do so. For what ought I to undertake more gladly, especially at your bidding?

26.2. For when a man most grave, most learned, most eloquent, and besides most busy, on the point of governing a great province, thinks it so worthwhile to carry my writings about with him, how greatly must I take care that this part of your baggage do not, as superfluous, offend you!

26.3. So I shall strive, first, that you may have these companions as agreeable as possible, and next, that on your return you may find others which you may wish to add to them. For you, my reader, are no slight spur to me toward new works. Farewell.

27.1. It is the third day since I heard Sentius Augurinus recite, with the greatest pleasure to myself — indeed, with admiration. He calls them "little poems." Many things are delicate, many lofty, many graceful, many tender, many sweet, many full of gall.

27.2. For some years, I think, nothing of the same kind has been written more finished — unless perhaps either my love of him deceives me, or the fact that he extolled me with praises.

27.3. For he took as his theme that I sometimes play in verse. And indeed I will make you the judge of my judgement, if the second line of this very theme comes back to me; for I hold the rest and have already unfolded them:

27.4. "I sing my songs in slender verses, those in which once my Catullus too, and Calvus, and the men of old. But what is that to me? One Plinius is to me the men of old: forsaking the forum, he prefers little verses, and seeks what he may love, and thinks he is loved. O that Plinius, how many Catos is he! Go now, whoever loves, and dare not to love."

27.5. You see how keen, how apt, how expressive it all is. By this taste I promise you the whole book, which I will show you as soon as he has published it. Meanwhile love the young man, and congratulate our age on so great a talent, which he adorns with his character. He lives with Spurinna, he lives with Antoninus; to the one he is related, to both a companion.

27.6. You may make a guess from this how faultless the young man is, who is so loved by men of the gravest age. For that saying is most true: "knowing that such a man is as those are with whom he delights to be." Farewell.

28.1. Herennius Severus, a most learned man, sets great store by placing in his library the portraits of your townsmen Cornelius Nepos and Titus Catius, and asks that, if they are there — as it is likely they are — I may have them copied and painted.

28.2. This task I lay upon you above all, first because you most kindly comply with my wishes, next because you have the highest reverence for studies and the highest love for the studious, and last because you venerate and love your homeland, and all who have enlarged its name, as you do the homeland itself.

28.3. I ask, moreover, that you take on the most careful painter you can. For while it is hard to fashion a likeness from the living original, by far the hardest of all is the imitation of an imitation; and I beg that you not let the artist you choose stray from it, even toward the better. Farewell.

29.1. Come now! When next the courts are in session, by whatever means come to give judgement: there is no reason for you to sleep on your right ear, trusting in me. Idleness is not unpunished.

29.2. Look at Licinius Nepos the praetor! Keen and bold, and a praetor: he fined even a senator. The senator pleaded his own cause in the Senate, but pleaded it in such a way as to beg off. The fine was remitted, but he was afraid, but he begged, but he needed pardon.

29.3. You will say, "Not all praetors are so severe." You are mistaken; for to set up or to revive such an example belongs only to the severe, but to carry on what has been set up or revived even the gentlest can do. Farewell.

30.1. I have brought you from my native town, as a little gift, a question most worthy of your profound learning.

30.2. A spring rises in a mountain, runs down over the rocks, and is caught in a little dining-room made by hand; there, held back a while, it falls into the Larian lake. Its nature is wonderful: three times a day, at fixed intervals, it rises and falls with regular increase and decrease.

30.3. This is seen plainly, and observed with the greatest pleasure. You recline beside it and dine, and even drink from the spring itself — for it is very cold; and meanwhile, at certain measured moments, it either sinks away or rises up.

30.4. You set a ring, or some other thing, on the dry part: the water laps it gradually and at last covers it, then uncovers it again and little by little leaves it. If you watch longer, you may see the same thing a second and a third time.

30.5. Is it some hidden breath that now opens, now closes the mouth and throat of the spring, as it comes in when admitted or recedes when driven out?

30.6. This we see happen in flasks and other vessels of the kind, whose outlet is not gaping nor at once open. For these too, though tilted and inclined, hold back through certain delays of the struggling air what they pour out, with frequent gulps, as it were.

30.7. Or is it that the nature which belongs to the ocean belongs to the spring too, and by the same principle by which the ocean is driven on or sucked back, this slight moisture is by turns suppressed and discharged?

30.8. Or is it that, as rivers carried down to the sea are turned back by opposing winds and the meeting tide, so there is something that beats back the outflow of this spring?

30.9. Or is there a fixed measure in the hidden veins, which, while it gathers what it has drained off, sends forth a smaller and slower stream, and, when it has gathered, a swifter and greater one?

30.10. Or is there some secret and hidden counterpoise which, when emptied, rouses and draws out the spring, and, when filled, delays and chokes it?

30.11. Search out the causes — for you can — that produce so great a marvel: for me it is more than enough, if I have sufficiently expressed what is produced. Farewell.