Book 7

1.1. This persistent illness of yours alarms me, and although I know you to be most temperate, I am afraid nevertheless that it may take some liberty even with your character.

1.2. So I urge you to resist it patiently: this is praiseworthy, this is health-giving. Human nature admits the advice I give.

1.3. I myself, at least, when in good health, am accustomed to speak thus to my household: 'I hope, indeed, that if I happen to fall into some adverse illness, I shall desire nothing that would deserve either shame or regret; but if the disease should prove too strong, I give notice that you are to give me nothing except what the doctors permit, and you may be sure that if you do give it, I shall take my revenge as others do over what is refused them.'

1.4. Indeed, when I was burning with a most violent fever, and at last, the fever having eased and I having been anointed, was about to take a draught from the doctor, I held out my hand and told him to touch it, and gave back the cup when it had already been brought to my lips.

1.5. Afterwards, when on the twentieth day of my illness I was being prepared for the bath and suddenly saw the doctors whispering together, I asked the reason. They answered that I could bathe safely, yet not altogether without some risk.

1.6. 'What need is there of it?' I said; and so, calmly and gently giving up the hope of the bath, to which I already seemed to be carried, I composed my mind and my expression for abstinence again, just as I had a moment before for the bath.

1.7. I have written this to you, first to admonish you not without an example, and then so that for the future I might bind myself to the same temperance, having pledged myself by this letter as by a kind of bond. Farewell.

2.1. How does it agree, that you should both assert you are hindered by ceaseless engagements, and yet long for my writings, which can scarcely win any of their fleeting time even from men of leisure?

2.2. I shall let the summer pass, then, restless and busy for you, and only in winter, when it will be credible that you can be free at least during the nights, shall I look out which of my trifles I had best offer you.

2.3. Meanwhile it is more than enough if my letters are not a burden; but they are, and so they shall be the shorter. Farewell.

3.1. With such persistence are you now in Lucania, now in Campania? 'For I myself,' you say, 'am Lucanian, my wife Campanian.'

3.2. A fair reason for a longer absence, but not a perpetual one. Why, then, do you not at some time return to the city? Here are rank, office, friendships both with your superiors and with your inferiors. How long will you reign? How long will you stay awake when you please, sleep as long as you please? How long will your shoes lie unused, your toga on holiday, the whole day free?

3.3. It is time you revisited our annoyances, if only for this reason, that those pleasures of yours may not grow stale through surfeit. Pay your respects for a while, so that being paid respects may be more agreeable to you; wear yourself out in this crowd, so that solitude may delight you.

3.4. But why, foolishly, do I hold back one whom I am trying to summon? For perhaps by these very words you are reminded to wrap yourself more and more in leisure — which I do not wish to be broken off, but only interrupted.

3.5. For just as, if I were preparing a dinner for you, I should mix sharp and pungent dishes with the sweet ones, so that the palate, dulled and cloyed by the former, might be roused by the latter, so now I urge you to season that most agreeable manner of life from time to time with a few sour touches, as it were. Farewell.

4.1. You say you have read my hendecasyllables; you ask, too, how I came to write them — I, a man you think severe, and one not, by my own confession, inept.

4.2. I have never — to go back further — been a stranger to poetry; indeed, at the age of fourteen I wrote a Greek tragedy. 'Of what kind?' you ask. I do not know; it was called a tragedy.

4.3. Later, when returning from military service I was detained by the winds on the island of Icaria, I composed Latin elegiacs on that very sea and island. I once tried my hand at heroic verse too, and now for the first time at hendecasyllables, whose birth had this occasion. There were being read to me at my Laurentine villa the books of Asinius Gallus comparing his father and Cicero. A certain epigram of Cicero's to his freedman Tiro turned up.

4.4. Then, when at midday — for it was summer — I had withdrawn to sleep, and sleep would not come, I began to reflect that the greatest orators had held this kind of pursuit among their delights and reckoned it among their glories.

4.5. I set my mind to it, and contrary to my own expectation, after a long disuse, in a very brief span of time I scratched out in these verses the very matter that had prompted me to write:

4.6. When I was reading Gallus' books, in which he dared to award his own father palm and honour above Cicero, I found a playful jest of Cicero's, to be admired for that same genius with which he composed his serious works, and with which, by human wit and much and varied charm, he showed that the minds of great men take delight. For he complains that, cheated by a wicked trick of his loving heart, Tiro after dinner withheld from him in the night the few little kisses that were his due.

4.5b. When I had read this, 'Why after this,' I said, 'do we conceal our own loves, and timidly bring nothing forward, nor confess Tiro's wiles, and admit we know Tiro's fugitive endearments and his thefts that add new flames?'

4.7. I passed on to elegiacs; these too I unfolded no less swiftly, and added others, led astray by the ease of it. Then, returning to the city, I read them to my companions; they approved.

4.8. After that, whenever I had leisure, and especially on a journey, I tried more metres. At last I resolved, after the example of many, to finish off one separate volume of hendecasyllables by itself, and I do not regret it.

4.9. It is read, copied out, even sung — and by Greeks too, whom love of this little book has taught Latin — now to the cithara, now to the lyre.

4.10. But why so boastfully? Though poets are allowed to be mad. And yet I speak not of my own judgement but of others'; and whether they judge rightly or err, it delights me. One thing only I pray: that posterity may either err in the same way or judge as they do. Farewell.

5.1. It is incredible with what longing for you I am held. The cause is, first, love, and then that we are not used to being apart. Hence it is that I spend a great part of the nights awake with your image before me; hence that in the daytime, at the hours when I used to visit you, my own feet carry me — as the saying truly goes — to your apartment; and then, sick and sorrowful and like one shut out, I withdraw from the empty threshold. The one time free from these torments is when I am worn down in the forum by my friends' lawsuits.

5.2. Judge for yourself what my life is, when my rest lies in toil, my solace in misery and cares. Farewell.

6.1. A rare and remarkable thing has befallen Varenus, though it is still uncertain. The Bithynians are said to have dropped their accusation against him as rashly begun. 'Said,' do I call it? The province's envoy is here; he has brought the council's decree to the Emperor, brought it to many leading men, brought it even to us, Varenus' advocates.

6.2. Yet that same Magnus persists; indeed, he presses Nigrinus, an excellent man, most obstinately. Through him he was demanding of the consuls that Varenus be compelled to produce his accounts.

6.3. I was assisting Varenus now only as a friend, and had resolved to keep silent. For nothing would be more contrary than that, an advocate assigned by the Senate, I should defend as guilty one who needed not to seem guilty at all.

6.4. When, however, Nigrinus' demand being finished, the consuls turned their eyes on me, I said: 'You shall learn that the reason for our silence is consistent, when you have heard the true envoys of the province.' Nigrinus countered: 'To whom were they sent?' I: 'To me as well: I have the province's decree.'

6.5. Again he: 'It may be clear to you.' To this I: 'If it is clear to you from the other side, it can also be clear to me, on the better side.'

6.6. Then the envoy Polyaenus set out the reasons for the abandoned accusation, and demanded that no prejudgement be made of the Emperor's cognizance. Magnus replied, and Polyaenus again. I myself, intervening rarely and briefly, kept much within silence.

6.7. For I have learned that at times it is no less the part of an orator to be silent than to speak. And indeed I recall that with certain defendants on capital charges I have done more good by silence than by the most careful speech.

6.8. A mother, having lost her son — for what forbids me, though the letter was begun for another reason, to discourse on matters of study? — had accused his freedmen, who were also her co-heirs, of forgery and poisoning before the Emperor, and had obtained Julius Servianus as judge.

6.9. I had defended the accused before a huge gathering; for the case was very well known, and besides, on both sides there were the most distinguished talents. The question was settled by an examination under torture, which decided in the defendants' favour.

6.10. Afterwards the mother went to the Emperor and affirmed she had found new proofs. Suburanus was instructed to give a hearing to one reopening a concluded case, if she should bring anything new.

6.11. Julius Africanus, grandson of that orator at whose word Passienus Crispus once said, 'Well, by Hercules, well — but to what purpose so well?', was assisting the mother. The grandson of this man, a clever young fellow but not a little crafty, when he had said much and filled out his allotted time, said: 'I ask, Suburanus, that you permit me to add one word.'

6.12. Then I, when all were looking at me as though I should reply at length, said: 'I would have replied, had Africanus added that one word, in which I do not doubt that everything would have been new.'

6.13. I cannot easily recall ever winning by pleading as much approval as I then won by not pleading. In like manner now both my silence on behalf of Varenus, so far, has been approved and well received.

6.14. The consuls, as Polyaenus had demanded, reserved everything intact for the Emperor; whose hearing I await in suspense. For that day will give us, on Varenus' behalf, either security and rest, or, with our interrupted labour renewed, lay fresh anxiety upon us. Farewell.

7.1. I have thanked our friend Priscus both recently and again now, because you bade me. Most gladly, indeed: for it is very pleasant to me that two excellent men, both my very dear friends, have grown so close to each other that you each think yourselves obligated to the other.

7.2. For he too declares that he derives a particular pleasure from your friendship, and competes with you in a most honourable contest of mutual affection, which time itself will increase. That you are detained by business I take amiss only because you cannot devote yourself to your studies. Yet if you will settle one suit through a judge and the other — as you say — yourself, you will first begin to enjoy leisure there, then, having had your fill, return to us. Farewell.

8.1. I cannot express how pleasant it is to me that our friend Saturninus, in letter after letter, renders you the warmest thanks in my hearing.

8.2. Go on as you have begun, and love this most excellent man as intimately as possible, since you will derive great pleasure from his friendship, and that for no brief time.

8.3. For while he abounds in all virtues, he excels above all in this, that he has the greatest steadfastness in friendship. Farewell.

9.1. You ask how I think you ought to study in the retirement you have now long been enjoying.

9.2. Useful above all — and many recommend it — is to translate either from Greek into Latin or from Latin into Greek. By this kind of exercise one acquires precision and brilliance of words, a wealth of figures, force of exposition, and, besides, the faculty of inventing what is similar to the best by imitating them; at the same time, what would have escaped a reader cannot escape a translator.

9.3. From this one acquires understanding and judgement. It will do no harm, when you have read a passage far enough to grasp its subject and argument, to write something as a rival to it, and then to compare it with what you have read, and carefully to weigh which is better, yours or his. Great is your satisfaction if some things of yours are better, great your shame if everything of his is. You may sometimes choose even the most famous passages and compete with what you have chosen.

9.4. This is bold, yet not presumptuous, because it is a private contest: though we see many who have taken up such contests for themselves with much praise, and have outstripped those whom they had thought it enough merely to follow, so long as they did not despair.

9.5. You may also revise what you have spoken, after it has faded from memory; retain much, pass over more, rewrite some parts, recast others.

9.6. This is laborious and full of tedium, but for that very difficulty fruitful: to grow warm again from the beginning and resume an impulse once broken and abandoned; and finally to weave new limbs, as it were, into a finished body without disturbing the earlier ones.

9.7. I know that your chief study now is oratory; but I would not on that account always recommend this combative and, as it were, warlike style. For just as the earth is renewed by various and changing seeds, so are our minds refreshed by now this practice, now that.

9.8. I would have you sometimes take up a passage from history; I would have you write a letter more carefully. For often in oratory too there arises a need for descriptions not merely historical but almost poetic, while a terse and pure manner of speech is to be drawn from letters.

9.9. It is permissible also to relax with verse — I do not mean continuous and long verse, for that cannot be accomplished except in leisure, but this pointed and brief kind, which fittingly breaks up any amount of business and care.

9.10. They are called trifles; but these trifles sometimes win no less glory than serious works. And indeed — for why should I not exhort you to verse in verse? —

9.11. as it is the merit of wax to follow, soft and yielding, the skilled fingers, and at command to become the work bidden, now to shape Mars or chaste Minerva, now to fashion Venus, now Venus' boy; and as sacred springs not only quench fires but often delight too with flowers and spring meadows, so it befits the mind of men to be bent and led through arts not rigid, with a trained agility.

9.12. And so the greatest orators, the greatest men too, used either to exercise or to delight themselves in this way — rather, to delight and exercise themselves at once.

9.13. For it is wonderful how the mind is both strained and relaxed by these little works. They take in love and hatred, anger and pity, urbanity — everything, in short, that has its place in life and even in the forum and the courts.

9.14. In these too there is the same usefulness as in other verse: that, bound by the necessity of metre, we rejoice in unfettered prose, and that, since comparison shows it to be easier, we write the more willingly.

9.15. You have here perhaps even more than you asked for; yet one thing I have omitted. For I have not said what I think should be read — though I have said it, when I said what should be written. Remember to choose carefully the authors in each kind. For they say much should be read, not many things.

9.16. Who these authors are is so well known and approved that it needs no pointing out; and besides, I have drawn this letter out so immoderately that, while advising you how you ought to study, I have taken away the time for studying. Why then do you not take up your tablets again and write something, either one of these things or that very piece you had begun? Farewell.

10.1. Because I myself, when I have learned the first part of a matter, am eager to join the last to it, I suppose that you too wish to learn the rest about Varenus and the Bithynians. The case was argued, on one side by Polyaenus, on the other by Magnus.

10.2. When the pleadings were finished, the Emperor said: 'Neither party shall complain of delay; it will be my concern to discover the province's will.'

10.3. Meanwhile Varenus gained much. For how doubtful is it whether a man is justly accused, when it is uncertain whether he is accused at all! It remains only that the province may not approve again what it is said to have condemned, and repent of its own repentance. Farewell.

11.1. You wonder that my freedman Hermes, without waiting for the auction, made over my fifth share of the inherited lands — which I had ordered to be advertised — to Corellia for seven hundred thousand sesterces. You add that these could fetch nine hundred thousand, and so all the more you ask whether I uphold what he has done.

11.2. Indeed I uphold it; for what reasons, hear. For I wish it to be both approved by you and excused by my co-heirs, that, at the bidding of a greater duty, I set myself apart from them.

11.3. I love and revere Corellia with the greatest respect, first as the sister of Corellius Rufus, whose memory is sacred to me, and then as the closest friend of my mother.

11.4. I have old ties too with her husband Minicius Justus, an excellent man; and I had the greatest with her son, so much so that he presided over the games I gave as praetor.

11.5. When I was last there, she let me know that she desired to own something around our Lake Como. I offered her, out of my own estates, whatever she wished and at whatever price she wished — except those that came from my mother and father; for these I cannot yield even to Corellia.

11.6. So when this inheritance fell to me, in which those properties were included, I wrote to her that they would be for sale. Hermes carried these letters, and when she demanded that he should make over my share to her at once, he obeyed. You see how bound I am to ratify what my freedman has done in accordance with my own principles.

11.7. It remains that my co-heirs should bear with an even mind my having sold separately what I might have not sold at all.

11.8. Nor indeed are they compelled to imitate my example: for they have not the same ties with Corellia as I have. They may therefore look to their own interest, in place of which I had friendship. Farewell.

12.1. The little book I composed, as you had required, so that your friend — or rather ours, for what is not common to us? — might use it if the case should call for it, I have sent you the more slowly so that you might not have time to correct it, that is, to spoil it.

12.2. Yet you shall have time — to correct it I know not, but at any rate to spoil it. For you over-zealous people draw off all the best parts.

12.3. But if you do so, I shall take it in good part. For afterwards I shall use those very passages as my own on some occasion, and by the benefit of your fastidiousness I myself shall be praised — as in that passage which you will find I have marked, and explained otherwise in a note above.

12.4. For when I suspected that it would seem to you too inflated, since it is more sonorous and lofty, I thought it not amiss, lest you should torment yourself, to add at once something more compressed and slender, or rather more lowly and worse, yet by your judgement more correct.

12.5. For why should I not everywhere pursue and harry your thinness of style? This, that you might sometimes laugh a little amid those engagements of yours; that other matter in earnest:

12.6. see that you repay me the travelling expense which I incurred deliberately by dispatching a courier. Surely, when you read this, you will condemn not parts of the little book but the whole book, and deny that anything is of any value the price of which is demanded back from you. Farewell.

13.1. The same letter signifies both that you are not studying and that you are. Do I speak in riddles? Quite plainly, until I declare more distinctly what I mean.

13.2. For it denies that you are studying, yet it is so polished that it cannot have been written except by one who studies; or else you are blessed above all men, if you accomplish such things in idleness and leisure. Farewell.

14.1. You act most honourably in asking and insisting so earnestly that I should order the price of the lands to be accepted from you not at the seven hundred thousand for which you bought them from my freedman, but at the nine hundred thousand for which you bought the twentieth part from the tax-farmers.

14.2. In my turn I both ask and insist that you look not only to what becomes you but also to what becomes me, and that you allow me to resist you in this one thing with the same spirit with which I am accustomed to comply with you in all. Farewell.

15.1. You ask what I am doing. What you know: I am torn by my duties, I serve my friends, I study now and then — which to do not now and then but only and always would have been, I dare not say more rightly, but certainly more blessedly.

15.2. I should be vexed that you are doing anything other than what you wish, were not the things you are doing most honourable. For both to manage the affairs of one's community and to arbitrate among friends is most deserving of praise.

15.3. I knew that the company of our friend Priscus would be pleasant to you. I had known his openness, I had known his courtesy; and that he is also — what I had known less — most grateful, I find by experience, since you write that he so pleasantly remembers our good offices. Farewell.

16.1. I love Calestrius Tiro most intimately, bound to me by ties both private and public.

16.2. We served together in the army, were together quaestors of the Emperor. He preceded me in the tribunate by virtue of the right of three children; I overtook him in the praetorship, when the Emperor remitted a year for me. I have often retired to his villas, he has often recovered his health in my house.

16.3. He is now about to make for the province of Baetica as proconsul, by way of Ticinum.

16.4. I hope — rather, I am confident — that I shall easily obtain that he turn aside from his route to you, if you wish to free by formal manumission those whom you lately set free among your friends. There is no reason for you to fear that this may be a trouble to him, for whom it will not be far to go round the whole world for my sake.

16.5. So lay aside that excessive bashfulness of yours, and consult what you wish. To him what I bid will be as pleasant as to me what you bid. Farewell.

17.1. Each man has his own reason for reciting; mine, as I have often said, is that if anything escapes me — as it certainly does — I may be reminded of it.

17.2. So I wonder all the more that, as you write, there have been some who found fault that I recited speeches at all; unless indeed they think that these alone need no correction.

17.3. Of these men I would gladly ask why they grant — if indeed they grant it — that history ought to be recited, which is composed not for display but for faith and truth; why tragedy, which calls not for an audience-hall but for a stage and actors; why lyric, which demands not a reader but a chorus and a lyre. Yet the recitation of these is now established by custom.

17.4. Is the man who began it, then, to be blamed? Though speeches too have been read aloud both by certain of our own people and by the Greeks.

17.5. Still, it is superfluous to recite what you have already delivered. Yes — if you recite the whole, the same, to the same persons, immediately; but if you insert much, change much, take on some new hearers and some of the same but after an interval, why is the reason for reciting what you have delivered less commendable than for publishing it?

17.6. But it is difficult for a speech to satisfy while it is being recited. That, however, belongs to the labour of the reciter, not to any reason for not reciting.

17.7. And in truth I desire to be praised not while I recite but while I am read. And so I omit no kind of correction. First I go over by myself what I have written; then I read it to two or three; next I hand it to others for annotation, and their notes, if I am in doubt, I weigh again with one or another; last of all I recite it to several, and then, if you believe me at all, I correct most keenly;

17.8. for the more anxiously, the more diligently I attend. The reverence, the shame, the fear of an audience are the best of all judges — and consider it thus: if you are going to speak with someone, however learned, but one only, are you not less moved than if with many, even unlearned?

17.9. When you rise to plead, do you not then most of all distrust yourself, then desire to change not, I say, most things, but everything? — especially if the stage is broader and the surrounding circle wider; for we hold in awe even those mean and shabbily clad ones.

17.10. If you think that your very first words are disapproved, are you not weakened and undone? I suppose because in number itself there is a kind of great and combined judgement, and those who singly have little discernment have most of all together.

17.11. And so Pomponius Secundus — that writer of tragedies — when some passage that a more intimate friend thought should be removed, but he himself thought should be kept, was at issue, used to say: 'I appeal to the people'; and thus, from the people's silence or assent, he followed either his own opinion or his friend's.

17.12. So much did he yield to the people; rightly or not is nothing to me. For I am accustomed to call in not the people but a chosen and select few, on whom I may keep my eyes, whom I may trust, whom in short I may both observe as individuals and fear as not individuals.

17.13. For what Marcus Cicero felt about the pen, I feel about fear: fear is the keenest of correctors. The very thought that we are about to recite corrects us; entering the audience-hall corrects us; that we grow pale, shudder, and look about us corrects us.

17.14. So I do not regret a habit which I find most useful, and so far from being deterred by the chatter of those men, I even ask you of my own accord to point out something I may add to my methods.

17.15. For nothing is enough for my care. I consider how great a thing it is to put something into men's hands, and I cannot persuade myself that what you wish to please both always and everybody is not to be handled both with many and often. Farewell.

18.1. You consult me how the money which you have offered our townsmen for a public feast may remain safe even after you are gone. An honourable question, but no easy answer. Should you pay over the sum to the community? It is to be feared lest it be frittered away. Should you give lands? As public property they will be neglected.

18.2. For my part I find nothing more convenient than what I myself did. For in place of the five hundred thousand sesterces which I had promised for the maintenance of freeborn boys and girls, I conveyed to a public agent a farm of mine worth far more; the same farm I took back subject to a rent, undertaking to pay thirty thousand a year.

18.3. By this means both the community's capital is safe and its income certain, and the land itself, because the rent largely exceeds it, will always find an owner to work it.

18.4. Nor am I unaware that I have laid out somewhat more than I appear to have given, since the necessity of the rent has reduced the price of a most beautiful estate.

18.5. But one ought to set public advantages before private, eternal before mortal, and to provide for one's gift far more carefully than for one's means. Farewell.

19.1. Fannia's illness distresses me. She contracted it while attending the Vestal virgin Junia — first of her own accord, for she is a relative, then also by the authority of the pontiffs.

19.2. For when the virgins are compelled by the violence of disease to leave the hall of Vesta, they are entrusted to the care and keeping of matrons. While Fannia was diligently discharging this office, she became involved in the present danger.

19.3. Fevers cling to her, her cough increases; she is wasted to the utmost, exhausted to the utmost. Only her mind and spirit are strong, most worthy of her husband Helvidius, of her father Thrasea; all else gives way, and they fill me not with fear only but also with grief.

19.4. For I grieve that a most great woman is being snatched from the eyes of the state, which I do not know whether it will ever see anything like her again. What purity she had, what holiness, what dignity, what steadfastness! Twice she followed her husband into exile; a third time she herself was banished on her husband's account.

19.5. For when Senecio was on trial for having composed books on the life of Helvidius, and had said in his defence that he had been asked by Fannia, and when Mettius Carus asked threateningly whether she had asked him, she answered: 'I asked'; whether she had given him notebooks to write from: 'I gave'; whether with her mother's knowledge: 'Without her knowledge'; in short, she uttered no word that yielded to danger.

19.6. Indeed, those very books, though abolished by a decree of the Senate out of the necessity and fear of the times, she preserved and kept when her property was confiscated, and carried into exile the very cause of her exile.

19.7. The same woman, how agreeable, how courteous, how — what is granted to few — no less lovable than venerable! Will there be one whom we can hereafter hold up as a model to our wives? Will there be one from whom even men may take examples of fortitude, whom, beholding and hearing, we may so admire as those women of whom we read?

19.8. And to me the very house seems to totter and, wrenched from its foundations, to be about to fall upon us, though it still has descendants. For by what great virtues, by what great deeds will they bring it about that she did not perish as the last of her line?

19.9. This too afflicts and tortures me, that her mother — that mother of so great a woman, than whom I can say nothing more illustrious — I seem to lose again, whom this woman, as she gives her back and restores her to us, so will take away with her, and afflict me with a wound at once new and reopened.

19.10. Both I cherished, both I loved: which the more, I do not know, nor did they wish it to be distinguished. They had my services in prosperity, they had them in adversity. I was the comfort of them when banished, the avenger of them when restored; yet I did not repay them in full, and so all the more I desire that this one be preserved, that time may remain for me to discharge my debt.

19.11. In such cares was I when I wrote to you; if some god turns them into joy, I shall not complain of my fear. Farewell.

20.1. I have read your book, and as carefully as I could noted what I thought should be changed, what should be cut out. For I am used to telling the truth, and you to hearing it gladly. Indeed, none are reproached more patiently than those who most deserve to be praised.

20.2. Now I await my book from you with your notes. O pleasant, O lovely exchange! How it delights me that, if posterity has any care for us, it will be told everywhere with what harmony, simplicity, and faith we lived!

20.3. It will be a rare and signal thing that two men, almost equal in age and rank, of some name in literature — for I am forced to speak more sparingly of you too, because I speak of myself at the same time — should each have fostered the other's studies.

20.4. For my part, as a very young man, when you were already flourishing in fame and glory, I longed to follow you, to be and to be reckoned 'next, but at a long interval' behind you. And there were many most distinguished talents; but you seemed to me — so did the kinship of our natures bear it — most able and most fit to be imitated.

20.5. So I rejoice all the more that, if there is any talk of literature, we are named together, that I come at once to the minds of those speaking of you. Nor are there lacking those who are preferred to us both.

20.6. But we — it matters nothing to me in what place — are joined together; for in my eyes the first is he who is nearest you. Indeed, you must have noticed in wills too: unless someone happens to be a special friend of one or the other of us, we receive the same legacies, and that equally.

20.7. All of which looks to this, that we should love each other the more ardently, since so many bonds bind us together — our studies, our characters, our reputation, and finally men's last judgements. Farewell.

21.1. I obey, dearest colleague, and consult my weak eyes as you bid. For I came here shut in on all sides in a covered carriage, as if in a bedroom, and here I refrain — with difficulty — not only from the pen but also from reading, and study with my ears alone.

21.2. I make my bedrooms shady by drawn curtains, yet not dark. The covered colonnade too, with the lower windows closed, has as much shadow as light. Thus little by little I learn to bear the light.

21.3. I take a bath because it does good, wine because it does no harm — most sparingly, however. So I have grown used to it, and now a guardian is at hand.

21.4. The hen, as sent by you, I received gladly; and with eyes sharp enough, though still bleary, I saw it to be very plump. Farewell.

22.1. You will wonder less that I asked so insistently for you to confer a tribunate on my friend, when you learn who and what kind of man he is. I can now both tell you his name and describe the man himself, since you have promised.

22.2. He is Cornelius Minicianus, an ornament of my region whether in rank or in character. Born of high family, he abounds in wealth, yet loves study as the poor are wont to. He is besides a most upright judge, a most courageous advocate, a most faithful friend.

22.3. You will believe you have received a benefit, when you have looked more closely at a man equal to all honours, all titles — I will say nothing too lofty of so modest a man. Farewell.

23.1. I rejoice indeed that you are so vigorous that you can meet Tiro at Mediolanum; but, that you may continue to be so vigorous, I beg you not to lay upon yourself so much toil against the reason of your age. Indeed, I give notice that you are to wait for him both at home and within your house, and even within the threshold of your bedroom.

23.2. For since I love him as a brother, he ought not to demand from one whom I respect in a parent's place an office that he would have excused his own parent. Farewell.

24.1. Ummidia Quadratilla died a little short of her eightieth year, vigorous to her very last illness, and indeed beyond a matron's measure of compact and robust body.

24.2. She died with a most honourable will: she left her grandson heir to two-thirds, her granddaughter to a third. The granddaughter I scarcely know; the grandson I love most intimately, a young man remarkable, and to be loved among his kin not only by those whom he touches by blood.

24.3. And first, conspicuous for his beauty, he passed both boyhood and youth free of all the slanderers' talk; a husband before his twenty-fourth year, and a father too, had the god granted it. He lived in the household of his pleasure-loving grandmother most strictly, and yet most dutifully.

24.4. She kept pantomimes and favoured them more lavishly than befits a woman of rank. These Quadratus would watch neither in the theatre nor at home, nor did she require it.

24.5. I heard from her own lips, when she was commending her grandson's studies to me, that she — as a woman with that leisure of her sex — was accustomed to relax her mind with the play of draughts, and to watch her own pantomimes, but that whenever she was about to do either, she always bade her grandson go away and study; which she seemed to me to do not more from love of him than from respect for him.

24.6. You will wonder — and I wondered too. At the last sacerdotal games, the pantomimes having been brought on at the opening, when Quadratus and I were leaving the theatre together, he said to me: 'Do you know that today, for the first time, I have seen my grandmother's freedman dance?' So said the grandson.

24.7. But, by Hercules, men who were no kin at all kept running to the theatre in Quadratilla's honour — I am ashamed to have said 'honour' — through a service of flattery, leaping, applauding, marvelling, and then giving back each of the lady's gestures with the songs; men who now will receive the tiniest legacies, the perquisite of theatrical service, from the heir who was not even watching.

24.8. This, because you are wont, if anything new occurs, to hear it not unwillingly; and then because it is pleasant to me to go over again in writing the joy I had felt. For I rejoice in the dead woman's devotion, in the honour shown to the excellent young man; I am glad too that the house that once belonged to Gaius Cassius — that founder and head of the Cassian school — will now serve a master no less great.

24.9. For my friend Quadratus will fill it and grace it, and restore to it its former dignity, fame, and glory, since as great an orator will come forth from it as that man was a jurist. Farewell.

25.1. O how much of the learned does either their own modesty or their quiet conceal and withdraw from fame! Yet we fear only those who are about to say or read something — namely, who put forth their studies — whereas those who keep silent give this further proof, that they revere with silence their greatest work.

25.2. I write what I write from experience. Terentius Junior, having most honourably discharged the equestrian military offices and even the procuratorship of the province of Narbonensis, withdrew to his fields, and, with honours ready to hand, preferred the most tranquil leisure.

25.3. Invited to his hospitality, I regarded him as a good head of a household, as a diligent farmer, intending to talk of those matters in which I thought him engaged; and I had begun, when he recalled me to literature with most learned discourse.

25.4. How polished was it all, how Latin, how Greek! For he is so strong in either tongue that he seems to excel rather in the one which he happens to be speaking. How much the man reads, how much he retains! You would think he lived at Athens, not in a country house.

25.5. In short, he increased my anxiety and brought it about that I fear those secluded and, as it were, rustic men no less than those whom I know to be most learned.

25.6. The same I advise you: for as in camps, so in our literary world too, there are, you will find on careful search, more in peasant garb whom you will discover to be girt and armed, and that with the most ardent genius. Farewell.

26.1. The illness of a certain friend lately reminded me that we are at our best when we are ailing. For what sick man is troubled by greed or lust?

26.2. He is not a slave to love-affairs, does not seek honours, neglects wealth, and however little he has, since he is about to leave it, holds it enough. Then he remembers that there are gods, that he himself is a man; he envies no one, admires no one, despises no one; he neither heeds nor is fed by malicious talk: he imagines baths and springs.

26.3. These are the sum of his cares, the sum of his prayers; and he resolves on a life soft and easy for the future, should he chance to escape — that is, a life harmless and blessed.

26.4. So I can, in brief, prescribe for you and for myself what philosophers try to teach in very many words, even in very many volumes: that we persevere in being, while well, such as we profess we shall be while ailing. Farewell.

27.1. Leisure affords me the means of learning and you of teaching. So I very much wish to know whether you think there are phantoms, and that they have a shape of their own and some divine power, or that, empty and unreal, they take on an image from our fear.

27.2. What chiefly leads me to believe they exist is what I hear befell Curtius Rufus. While still of slender means and obscure, he had attached himself as a companion to the governor of Africa. As the day was declining, he was walking in a colonnade; there was offered to him the figure of a woman greater and more beautiful than human. To him in his terror she said she was the foreteller of the future: he would go to Rome and hold offices, and even return to that same province with supreme command, and there die.

27.3. All came to pass. Moreover, it is told that as he approached Carthage and was disembarking, the same figure met him on the shore. He himself, certainly, when seized by illness, augured the future from the past, adversity from prosperity, and gave up hope of recovery though none of his people despaired.

27.4. Now is not this both more terrible and no less wonderful which I shall set forth as I received it?

27.5. There was at Athens a spacious and roomy house, but of ill repute and pestilential. Through the silence of the night a sound of iron, and, if you listened more keenly, a clanking of chains, was returned, far off at first, then close at hand: presently there appeared a spectre, an old man, worn with leanness and squalor, his beard flowing, his hair bristling; on his legs he bore fetters, on his hands chains, and shook them.

27.6. Thence the dwellers passed sad and dreadful nights awake through fear; sickness followed the waking, and, as the dread grew, death. For in the daytime too, though the apparition had withdrawn, the memory of it hovered before their eyes, and the fear lasted longer than its causes. So the house was deserted, condemned to solitude, and left wholly to that monster; yet it was advertised, in case anyone, ignorant of so great an evil, should wish to buy or rent it.

27.7. To Athens came the philosopher Athenodorus; he read the notice, and on hearing the price, because its cheapness was suspect, made inquiry and learned everything; and none the less — rather, all the more — he rented it. When evening began to come on, he ordered a couch to be spread for him in the front part of the house, called for his tablets, a pen, a lamp, and sent all his people into the inner rooms. He himself fixed his mind, eyes, and hand on writing, lest an empty mind should fashion for itself the spectres it had heard of and idle fears.

27.8. At first, the silence of night as everywhere; then the iron was shaken, the chains moved. He did not raise his eyes or lay down his pen, but steadied his mind and shut his ears against the sound. Then the din grew, approached, and now was heard as if on the threshold, now as if within it. He looked round, saw and recognized the figure that had been described to him.

27.9. It stood and beckoned with its finger, as one calling. He on his side signed with his hand that it should wait a little, and bent again over his wax and pen. It clashed its chains over the head of him as he wrote. He looked round again at the same figure beckoning as before, and without delay took up the lamp and followed.

27.10. It went with slow step, as if heavy with its chains. After it had turned aside into the courtyard of the house, it suddenly vanished and deserted its companion. Left alone, he set plucked grass and leaves as a mark of the place.

27.11. The next day he went to the magistrates and urged them to order that place to be dug up. There were found bones entwined and bound with chains, which the body, rotted by time and the earth, had left bare and corroded within the fetters; they were gathered and given public burial. Afterwards the house, the shade having been duly laid to rest, was free of it.

27.12. And these things I believe on the word of those who affirm them; this I can affirm to others. I have a freedman not without education. With him his younger brother used to sleep in the same bed. He seemed to himself to see someone sitting on the couch and bringing scissors to his head, and even cutting off the hair from the very crown. When day came, he was found shorn about the crown, and his hair lying scattered.

27.13. A short interval, and again another like the former gave it credence. A slave-boy was sleeping among many in the boys' quarters. There came — so he tells — through the windows two men in white tunics, who sheared him as he lay and withdrew the way they had come. Him too day showed shorn, with his hair scattered about.

27.14. Nothing notable followed, unless perhaps that I was not accused, though I should have been, had Domitian, under whom these things happened, lived longer. For in his desk was found a paper given against me by Carus; from which it may be conjectured that, since it is the custom for the accused to let their hair grow long, the cutting off of my people's hair was a sign of the danger that threatened me, and that it was averted.

27.15. So I ask you to apply your learning. The matter is worthy of your long and deep consideration; nor am I unworthy that you should bestow on me the abundance of your knowledge.

27.16. You may even argue both sides — as you are wont — yet more strongly on one, so that you do not dismiss me in suspense and uncertainty, when the very cause of my consulting you has been that I might cease to doubt. Farewell.

28.1. You say some at your place have found fault with me, as though I praise my friends beyond measure on every occasion.

28.2. I acknowledge the charge, I even embrace it. For what is more honourable than the fault of kindliness? Yet who are these who know my friends better than I? But, suppose they do know them, why do they grudge me my most happy error? For though they be not such as I proclaim them, still I am blessed because they seem so to me.

28.3. Let them turn this sinister diligence, then, upon others; nor are there few who call carping at their friends judgement. They will never persuade me that I think mine too much loved by me. Farewell.

29.1. You will laugh, then be indignant, then laugh again, if you read this — which, unless you read it, you cannot believe.

29.2. There is, on the Tiburtine way within the first milestone — I noted it lately — a monument of Pallas inscribed thus: 'To him the Senate, for his loyalty and devotion towards his patrons, decreed the praetorian insignia and fifteen million sesterces, with the honour of which he was content.'

29.3. For my part I have never wondered at things that proceed more often from fortune than from judgement; but this inscription above all reminded me how mocking and absurd were the things sometimes flung down into this mire, into these dregs — things which that gallows-bird both dared to accept and to refuse, and even to hand down to posterity as a model of moderation.

29.4. But why am I indignant? Better to laugh, lest those think they have attained something great who come to such a pitch of good fortune as to be laughed at. Farewell.

30.1. I am tormented that you have lost, as you write, a pupil of the highest promise. That your studies should be hindered by his illness and death — why should I not know it? — when you are most observant of all your duties, and love most warmly all whom you approve.

30.2. Here too the city's business pursues me; for there are those who make me a judge or arbiter.

30.3. Added to this are the complaints of the country folk, who after a long time abuse my ears by their right. There presses too the necessity of letting out my farms, most troublesome: so rare is it to find suitable tenants.

30.4. For which reasons I study on sufferance, yet I study. For I both write something and read; but when I read, I feel by comparison how badly I write, although you give me good heart,

30.5. you who compare my little books on the vengeance of Helvidius with Demosthenes' speech against . . . Meidias. This I had indeed in my hands when composing them — not that I might rival it, for that would be presumptuous and almost mad, but that I might imitate and follow it, so far as the difference between the greatest and the least talent, or the dissimilarity of the cases, allowed. Farewell.

31.1. Claudius Pollio desires to be loved by you, worthy of this by the very fact that he desires it, and then because he himself loves you; for scarcely anyone makes this demand except one who does the same. He is besides a man upright, honest, quiet, and almost beyond measure — if anyone is beyond measure — modest.

31.2. When we served together in the army, I observed him not merely as a fellow-soldier. He commanded a cavalry regiment a thousand strong; I, ordered by the consular legate to examine the accounts of the cavalry and infantry units, found in some a great and foul greed and an equal negligence, but in him the highest integrity and a scrupulous diligence.

31.3. Afterwards, promoted to the most important procuratorships, he was corrupted by no opportunity and never swerved from his inborn love of abstinence; he never swelled up in prosperity; he never broke his continuous reputation for humanity by any variety of his offices, and with the same firmness of mind sufficed for his labours as he now endures his leisure.

31.4. This indeed he interrupted and laid aside for a little while, with great credit to himself, when he was taken on by our friend Corellius as an assistant in buying and distributing lands under the liberality of the Emperor Nerva. For with what glory is it worthy that, when there was so great a choice of men, he should have specially pleased so great a man!

31.5. How reverently, how faithfully he honours his friends, you may believe from the last judgements of many, among them that of Annius Bassus, a most weighty citizen, whose memory he prolongs and extends by so grateful a proclamation that he has published a book on his life — for he reveres literature too, as he does the other good arts.

31.6. That is a fine thing, and to be approved by its very rarity, since most men remember the dead only to complain.

31.7. This man, most desirous of your friendship — believe me — embrace, lay hold of, even invite, and love him as though you were repaying a favour. For he who began first is to be requited, not obliged, in the office of love. Farewell.

32.1. I am delighted that the arrival of my friend Tiro was pleasant to you; and that, as you write, on the occasion of the proconsul's coming very many were set free, I rejoice exceedingly. For I desire our native country to be increased in all things indeed, but most of all in the number of its citizens: for that is the firmest ornament of towns.

32.2. This too gladdens me — not as an ambitious man, yet still it gladdens me — that you add that you and I were celebrated both with thanks and with praise. For, as Xenophon says, 'praise is the sweetest of all things to hear,' especially if you think you deserve it. Farewell.

33.1. I prophesy — and my prophecy does not deceive me — that your histories will be immortal; and so all the more — I will frankly confess it — I desire to be inserted in them.

33.2. For if it is usually our care that our face should be portrayed by the best artist, ought we not to wish that our deeds should find a writer and herald like yourself?

33.3. I point out, then — though it cannot escape your diligence, since it is in the public records — yet I point it out, that you may the more believe, how pleasant it will be to me if my deed, the credit of which grew through its danger, you should adorn by your genius and your testimony.

33.4. The Senate had assigned me, with Herennius Senecio, as advocate of the province of Baetica against Baebius Massa, and, Massa being condemned, had decreed that his property be kept under public guard. Senecio, having discovered that the consuls would be free for petitions, met me and said: 'With the harmony with which we have carried out the accusation laid upon us, let us approach the consuls and ask that they not allow the dispersal of the property which ought to be in custody.'

33.5. I answered: 'Since we were assigned as advocates by the Senate, consider whether you think our part is finished now that the Senate's cognizance is concluded.' And he: 'You may set yourself whatever limit you wish, you who have no tie with the province save by your own kindness, and that a recent one; I myself was both born there and was quaestor in it.'

33.6. Then I: 'If that is fixed and settled with you, I will follow you, so that, if any ill-will arise from this, it may not be yours alone.'

33.7. We came to the consuls; Senecio said what the case demanded, and I added something. Scarcely had we fallen silent when Massa, complaining that Senecio had filled not the loyalty of an advocate but the bitterness of an enemy, charged him with impiety.

33.8. Horror in all; but I said: 'I fear, most illustrious consuls, that Massa by his silence has charged me with collusion, in that he did not charge me too as a defendant.' This saying was at once taken up, and afterwards much celebrated in talk.

33.9. The deified Nerva indeed — for even as a private man he attended to whatever was rightly done in public — having sent me a most weighty letter, congratulated not me only but the age, to which there had fallen — so he wrote — an example like those of old.

33.10. These things, however they stand, you will make better known, more famous, greater; though I do not require you to exceed the measure of the deed as done. For history ought not to go beyond the truth, and for honourable deeds the truth suffices. Farewell.