Book 8

1.1. I made my journey comfortably, except that some of my people contracted illness in the most scorching heat.

1.2. Encolpius indeed, my reader — that delight, that pride of mine — coughed up blood from his throat, made raw by the dust. How sad this is for himself, how bitter for me, if he to whom all my charm in study is owed should be made unfit for study! Who then will read my little books so well, will love them so? Whom will my ears so follow?

1.3. But the gods promise happier things. The blood has stopped, the pain has subsided. Besides, he himself is temperate, we are anxious, the doctors diligent. To this add the healthfulness of the air, the seclusion, the quiet, which promise as much of recovery as of leisure. Farewell.

2.1. Others set out for their estates that they may return the richer; I, that I may return the poorer. I had sold my vintage to dealers who bid eagerly. The price invited them, both what it was then and what it seemed likely to be.

2.2. The hope failed. It would have been easy to remit something to all alike, but not altogether fair. To me, however, it seems above all an excellent thing to practise justice abroad as at home, in great matters as in small, in others' affairs as in one's own. For if faults are equal, the praises too are equal.

2.3. So to all indeed — that none might 'go away ungifted' — I conceded an eighth of the price at which each had bought; then to those who had engaged the largest sums in their purchases I made separate provision. For they had both helped me more and made a greater loss themselves.

2.4. Therefore to those who had bought for more than ten thousand I added, to that common and, as it were, public eighth, a tenth of that sum by which they had exceeded ten thousand.

2.5. I fear I have not expressed it clearly: I will show it more plainly by calculation. If, for instance, any had bought for fifteen thousand, these received both an eighth of the fifteen thousand and a tenth of the five thousand.

2.6. Besides, when I reflected that some had repaid a good part of what they owed, some something, some nothing, I judged it by no means right that those whom good faith in payment had not made equal should be made equal by the kindness of my remission.

2.7. So again, to those who had paid I remitted a tenth of what they had paid. By this means it seemed both that thanks were most fitly returned for the past to each according to his desert, and that for the future all were enticed, alike to buy and to pay.

2.8. This policy, or this easiness, cost me much, but it was worth it. For throughout the whole region both the novelty and the form of the remission are praised. And from those very men whom I treated not by one and the same measure, as the saying goes, but distinctly and by degrees, each went away, the better and more honest he was, the more obliged to me, having learned by experience that with me 'in one and the same honour are the coward and the brave.' Farewell.

3.1. The book I last sent you, you signify, pleases you above all of mine. So thinks a certain most learned man too.

3.2. By which I am the more led to think that neither of you is mistaken, because it is not credible that both should be mistaken, and yet because I flatter myself. For I wish each most recent thing to seem the most finished, and so already now I favour, against this book, the speech which I lately gave to the public, and which I shall share with you as soon as I find a careful carrier.

3.3. I have raised your expectation, which I fear the speech, once taken in hand, may disappoint. Meanwhile, all the same, await it as one likely to please — and perhaps it will please. Farewell.

4.1. You do most rightly in preparing to write of the Dacian war. For what material is so recent, so abundant, so lofty, so finally poetic and, though in matters most true, so fabulous?

4.2. You will tell of new rivers led over the land, of new bridges thrown across rivers, of mountain precipices held by camps, of a king driven from his palace, driven even from life, yet despairing of nothing; besides these, of two triumphs celebrated, of which the one was the first over an unconquered nation, the other the last.

4.3. There is one difficulty, but the greatest: that to equal these things in the telling is arduous, immense, even for your genius, although it rises to the loftiest heights and grows with the most splendid works. There is some labour too in this, that barbarous and savage names — above all the king's own — should not jar in Greek verse.

4.4. But there is nothing that may not, by art and care, if it cannot be conquered, at least be softened. Besides, if it is granted to Homer to contract, extend, and inflect soft and Greek words for the smoothness of his verse, why should not a like boldness be granted to you, especially when it is not over-nice but necessary?

4.5. So, having invoked the gods after the right of poets — and among the gods that very one whose deeds, works, and counsels you are about to tell — let out the ropes, spread the sails, and, if ever you did, be borne along with your whole genius. For why should not I too be poetic with a poet?

4.6. This I bargain for now: that you send me each first part as soon as you have finished it — nay, even before you finish, just as the parts shall be, fresh and rough and still like things newborn.

4.7. You will reply that pieces cannot please as well taken separately as woven together, nor begun as well as finished. I know. So by me too they shall be valued as begun, regarded as limbs, and shall await your final polish in my desk. Allow me to have this, above the rest, as a pledge of your love, that I may know even those things which you would wish no one to know. Farewell.

5.1. Our friend Macrinus has received a grievous wound: he has lost his wife of singular example, even if she had lived of old. He lived with her thirty-nine years without quarrel, without offence. What reverence she showed her husband, when she herself deserved the greatest! How many and how great virtues, drawn from different ages, she gathered and blended!

5.2. Macrinus has indeed a great solace, that he held so great a good so long; but from this he is the more embittered, that he has lost it; for the grief of being deprived grows with the enjoyment of pleasures.

5.3. So I shall be in suspense for this most dear friend, until he can admit distractions and bear a scar — which nothing brings on so well as necessity itself, and length of days, and a surfeit of grief. Farewell.

6.1. You must already know from my letter that I lately noted the monument of Pallas under this inscription: '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.'

6.2. Afterwards it seemed to me worth the trouble to seek out the decree of the Senate itself. I found it so copious and effusive that that most arrogant inscription seemed modest and even humble. Let them set themselves beside it and mingle with it — I do not say those men of old, the Africani, the Achaici, the Numantini, but these of recent times, the Marii, the Sullae, the Pompeii — I will not go further: they will lie below the praises of Pallas.

6.3. Shall I think those who decreed these things witty, or wretched? I would say witty, if wit became the Senate; wretched — but no one is so wretched as to be forced to such things. Was it then ambition and a lust for advancement? But who is so mad as to wish to advance, through his own and the state's disgrace, in that commonwealth in which this was the use of the most flourishing rank, that he might be the first in the Senate to praise Pallas?

6.4. I pass over that praetorian insignia are offered to Pallas a slave — for they are offered by slaves; I pass over that they decree he should be not merely exhorted but even compelled to wear gold rings; for it would have been against the majesty of the Senate, if a man of praetorian rank should wear iron ones.

6.5. These are trifling and to be passed by; but this is to be recorded, that in the name of Pallas the Senate — nor was the senate-house ever afterwards expiated — in the name of Pallas the Senate gives thanks to the Emperor, because both he himself had made mention of him with the highest honour, and had given the Senate the opportunity of testifying its goodwill towards him.

6.6. For what could be finer for the Senate than that it should appear sufficiently grateful towards Pallas? It is added: 'That Pallas, to whom all confess themselves obligated each to the utmost of his power, may most deservedly receive the fruit of his singular loyalty and singular industry.' You would believe the empire's frontiers had been extended, armies restored to the republic.

6.7. To these is joined: 'Since to the Senate and people of Rome no more pleasing occasion of liberality could be presented than if they might help the means of the most abstinent and faithful guardian of the imperial wealth.' This then was the Senate's prayer, this the chief joy of the people, this the most welcome occasion of liberality — if it might fall out to help the means of Pallas by a draining of the public wealth.

6.8. Now what follows? That the Senate had wished indeed to decree that fifteen million sesterces should be given from the treasury, and, the further his mind was removed from such desires, the more earnestly to beg of the public father that he should compel him to yield to the Senate.

6.9. This indeed was all that was lacking: that public authority should treat with Pallas, that Pallas should be asked to yield to the Senate, that to that most arrogant abstinence the Emperor himself should be summoned as patron and advocate, lest he should spurn the fifteen million sesterces. He spurned it — the only thing he could do more arrogantly than if he had accepted so great a sum publicly offered.

6.10. Yet the Senate carried this too, like one complaining, with praises, and in these very words: 'But since the best of princes and public father, asked by Pallas, had wished that part of the resolution which pertained to giving him fifteen million sesterces from the treasury to be remitted, the Senate testifies that it had both gladly and deservedly begun to decree this sum among his other honours, for his loyalty and diligence to Pallas, yet that it complies in this matter too with the will of its prince, against whom it thought it right in nothing to resist.'

6.11. Imagine Pallas, as it were, interposing his veto against a decree of the Senate, and moderating his own honours, and refusing the fifteen million sesterces as too much, when he had accepted the praetorian insignia as though it were less;

6.12. imagine the Emperor obeying the entreaties — or rather the command — of his freedman in the Senate's presence; for the freedman commands the patron whom he asks in the Senate; imagine the Senate testifying everywhere that it had deservedly and gladly begun to decree this sum among the rest of Pallas' honours, and would have persevered, had it not complied with the will of its prince, against whom it was not right to resist in anything. Thus, that Pallas might not carry off the fifteen million sesterces from the treasury, his own modesty needed the compliance of the Senate — a Senate that would in this above all not have complied, had it thought it right in any matter not to comply.

6.13. Do you suppose this is the end? Wait awhile and receive greater things: 'And that, since it is useful that the prince's benignity, most prompt to praise and reward those who deserve, should be illustrated everywhere and most of all in those places where those set in charge of his affairs might be incited to imitation, and that the most approved loyalty and innocence of Pallas might by its example provoke a zeal for so honourable an emulation, the resolutions which the best of princes had recited on the twenty-third of January last in that most ample order, and the decrees of the Senate made concerning these matters, should be engraved in bronze, and that bronze be fixed beside the cuirassed statue of the deified Julius.'

6.14. It seemed too little that the senate-house should be witness of such disgraces: a most frequented place was chosen, in which they might be set forth to be read by those present, to be read by those to come. It was resolved to record in bronze all the honours of that most fastidious chattel, both those he had refused and those — so far as concerns the decreers — he accepted. The praetorian insignia of Pallas were cut and graven on public and eternal monuments, as though they were ancient treaties, as though sacred laws.

6.15. So great was the — I know not what to call it — that the prince, the Senate, Pallas himself wished to be fixed before all men's eyes: Pallas his insolence, the Emperor his patience, the Senate its humility. Nor were they ashamed to set a reason against the baseness — an excellent and fine reason, forsooth: that by the example of Pallas' rewards the rest might be provoked to a zeal of emulation.

6.16. Such was the cheapness of honours — even of those which Pallas did not disdain. Yet there were found men born in honourable station who sought and desired what they saw given to a freedman, promised to slaves.

6.17. How glad I am that I did not fall upon those times, for which I blush as much as if I had lived in them! I do not doubt that you are affected likewise. I know how living and freeborn is your spirit: so it is the easier for you to believe that I, though in certain places I may perhaps have carried my indignation beyond the measure of a letter, have grieved too little rather than too much. Farewell.

7.1. Neither as master to master nor as pupil to pupil — for so you write — but as master to pupil — for you are the master, I the contrary; and indeed you call me back to school, while I still prolong the Saturnalia — you have sent me a book.

7.2. Could I have made a longer hyperbaton, and by this very thing prove that I am one who ought to be called not only not your master but not even your pupil? Yet I will take on the master's part and exert over your book the right you have given, the more freely because I shall send you nothing of mine meanwhile in which you may take your revenge. Farewell.

8.1. Have you ever seen the spring of Clitumnus? If not yet — and I think not yet, otherwise you would have told me — see it; which I — I regret my slowness — lately saw.

8.2. A modest hill rises, wooded and shady with ancient cypress. Beneath it the spring comes out and is forced up through many veins, but unequal ones, and, having struggled free, opens out into the pool it makes, with a broad bosom, clear and glassy, so that you can count the coins thrown in and the gleaming pebbles.

8.3. Thence it is driven on, not by the slope of the place but by its own abundance and, as it were, weight, a spring still and already a most full river, and even capable of bearing ships; which, meeting it too and striving against it in opposite directions, it carries across and bears on, so strong that in the direction in which it itself hastens, though over level ground, it is not helped by oars, while against it the same river is overcome with great difficulty by oars and poles.

8.4. Both are pleasant to those who float for jest and sport, to vary, as they bend their course, toil with ease and ease with toil. The banks are clad with much ash, much poplar, which the clear stream counts among its number, as if sunk, in a green reflection. The coldness of the water might vie with snows, nor does its colour yield.

8.5. Hard by is an ancient and venerable temple. Clitumnus himself stands, robed and adorned with the bordered toga; the oracular lots declare a present and even prophetic divinity. Scattered round about are several chapels, and as many gods. Each has his own worship, his own name, some indeed their own springs too. For besides that one, as it were the parent of the rest, there are lesser ones distinguished by their source; but they mingle with the river, which is crossed by a bridge.

8.6. This is the boundary of the sacred and the profane: in the upper part it is permitted only to sail, below it even to swim. The people of Hispellum, to whom the deified Augustus gave that place as a gift, provide a bath at public cost, provide lodging too. Nor are there lacking villas which, following the river's charm, stand on its margin.

8.7. In short, there will be nothing from which you will not take pleasure. For you will study too: you will read many things by many men, inscribed on every column and every wall, by which that spring and god are celebrated. Many you will praise, some you will laugh at — though you, indeed, with your humanity, will laugh at none. Farewell.

9.1. It is long since I have taken book or pen in hand; long since I know not what leisure or rest is, or that idle yet pleasant doing of nothing and being nothing: so many affairs of my friends suffer me neither to retire nor to study.

9.2. For no studies are worth so much that the office of friendship should be deserted, which the studies themselves teach is to be guarded most religiously. Farewell.

10.1. The more you desire to see great-grandchildren from us, the sadder will you hear that your granddaughter has miscarried, since, girl-like, she did not know she was pregnant, and on this account omitted some things to be observed by pregnant women, and did things to be omitted. This error she expiated by great proofs, brought into the utmost danger.

10.2. So, as you must take it grievously that your old age is robbed, as it were, of posterity already prepared, so you ought to give thanks to the gods that, while they denied you great-grandchildren for the present, they preserved your granddaughter, and will give back those whom this very fruitfulness, though tried with too little success, makes us hope for the more surely.

10.3. With these same arguments I now exhort, admonish, and strengthen you with which I do myself. For you do not desire great-grandchildren more ardently than I children, to whom I seem about to leave, from my side and yours, an easy path to honours, names widely known, and ancestral images not of yesterday. Only let them be born, and turn this grief of ours into joy. Farewell.

11.1. When I consider your affection towards your brother's daughter, softer even than a mother's indulgence, I understand that what is last is to be announced to you first, so that joy taken in advance may leave no room for anxiety. Though I fear that even after my congratulation you may return to fear, and so rejoice that she is freed from danger as at the same time to shudder that she was in danger.

11.2. Now cheerful, now restored to herself, now to me, she begins to recover, and to measure the crisis past by her convalescing. She was otherwise in the utmost danger — may I be allowed to have said it without harm — through no fault of her own, some fault of her age. Hence the miscarriage, and the sad lesson of a womb unknown.

11.3. So, even if it has not fallen to you to console the loss of your dead brother with a grandson or granddaughter of his, remember nevertheless that this is rather deferred than denied, since she from whom it can be hoped is safe. At the same time excuse to your father this mishap, who finds pardon more readily for women. Farewell.

12.1. This one day I beg off: Titinius Capito is to recite, whom I know not whether I ought rather to hear or to wish to hear. He is an excellent man, and to be numbered among the chief ornaments of the age. He cultivates literature, loves, fosters, advances the studious — the harbour, the bay, the bosom of many who compose anything, the example of all, and, in short, the restorer and reformer of letters themselves, now growing old.

12.2. He lends his house to those who recite, and frequents the reading-halls, not only at his own place, with wonderful kindness; to me at least, if only I was in the city, he never failed. The more disgraceful, then, it would be not to return thanks, the more honourable the cause for returning them.

12.3. Or, if I were worn with lawsuits, should I believe myself bound to one who attended my recognizances; and now, because all my business, all my care is in study, should I be less obligated to one who celebrates me with such diligence, in the one thing wherein I can be obligated — I will not say alone, but certainly most of all?

12.4. But even if I owed him no return, no mutual offices as it were, I should still be moved either by the man's most beautiful genius — and that most gentle, even in the greatest severity — or by the honourableness of his subject. He writes of the deaths of illustrious men, among them of some most dear to me.

12.5. I seem, then, to perform a pious office, and at the funeral eulogies, late indeed but for that reason the truer, of those whose obsequies I was not permitted to celebrate, to be present. Farewell.

13.1. I approve that you have read my little books with your father. It tends to your progress to learn from a most eloquent man what is to be praised, what to be blamed, and at the same time to be so trained that you grow used to telling the truth.

13.2. You see whom you should follow, whose footsteps you ought to fill. O happy you, to whom it has fallen to have one and the same model, the best and the most closely joined, who, in short, have one above all to imitate, to whom nature has willed that you be most like! Farewell.

14.1. Since you are most skilled both in private law and in public, of which the senatorial is a part, I wish to hear from you above all whether I erred lately in the Senate or not — not for the past, for that is too late, but so that for the future, if anything similar should occur, I may be instructed.

14.2. You will say: 'Why do you ask what you ought to have known?' The servitude of former times brought, as upon other excellent arts, so upon the law of the Senate too, a kind of forgetfulness and ignorance.

14.3. For how few are so patient as to be willing to learn what they will not have occasion to use? Add that it is hard to retain what you have received unless you practise it. So liberty restored has caught us untrained and inexpert; fired by its sweetness, we are compelled to do certain things before we know them.

14.4. Now in old times it was the custom that we should learn from our elders not by the ears only but also by the eyes those things which we ourselves were soon to do, and by certain alternations to hand down to our juniors.

14.5. Hence young men were at once steeped in military service, that they might learn to command by obeying, to lead while they followed; hence those about to seek office stood at the doors of the senate-house, and were spectators of the public council before they were partners in it.

14.6. Each had his own father for master, or he who had no father, the greatest and oldest man in his father's place. What power belongs to those who lay matters before the Senate, what right to those who vote, what force to the magistrates, what liberty to the rest, where one must yield, where resist, what the time for silence, what the measure of speaking, how to distinguish conflicting opinions, how to carry out those who add something to earlier ones — in short, all the senatorial custom — they were taught by examples, the surest means of learning.

14.7. But we young men were indeed in the camps; yet at a time when virtue was suspect, sloth in esteem; when commanders had no authority, soldiers no reverence; when there was nowhere command, nowhere obedience, all things loosened, confused, and even turned to their contrary — things, in short, rather to be forgotten than held.

14.8. We likewise looked into the senate-house, but a senate-house trembling and tongue-tied, when to say what you wished was dangerous, what you did not wish, wretched. What could then be learned, what profit was there in having learned, when the Senate was summoned either to the utmost idleness or to the utmost wickedness, and, kept for sport now, now for grief, never decreed serious things, and sad ones often?

14.9. The same evils, now as senators, now as partners in the evils, we saw and endured for many years; by which our talents for the future too were dulled, broken, bruised.

14.10. Short is the time — for every time is the shorter the happier it is — in which it pleases us to know what we are, in which it pleases us to exercise what we know. So with the more right I ask, first, that you pardon my error, if there is any error, and then that you remedy it by your knowledge, which has always made it its care to treat public law as well as private, ancient as well as recent, rare as well as common.

14.11. And I think that even to those whom frequent dealing with very many matters suffered to be ignorant of nothing, the kind of question I bring to you was either not sufficiently familiar or even untried. So I am the more excusable if perchance I have slipped, and you the more worthy of praise, if you can teach even that which is in doubt whether you yourself had learned it.

14.12. A motion was being put concerning the freedmen of the consul Afranius Dexter, slain — it was uncertain whether by his own or his people's hand, by crime or by obedience. These one man — Who? I; but it matters not — judged should be freed from punishment after the inquiry by torture; another, that they should be relegated to an island; another, that they should be punished with death. Of these opinions the difference was so great that they could not but stand singly.

14.13. For what has killing in common with relegating? Truly no more than relegating with acquitting; although the opinion that relegates is somewhat nearer to the one that acquits than to the one that kills — for either of these leaves life, the latter takes it away — while meanwhile both those who would punish with death and those who would relegate sat together, and by a temporary pretence of concord deferred their discord.

14.14. I demanded that to the three opinions their own number should belong, and that two should not join by a brief truce. So I insisted that those who thought they should suffer capital punishment should withdraw from the one who relegated, nor meanwhile band together against the acquitters, though about to disagree presently; because it mattered little whether the same thing displeased those to whom the same thing had not been pleasing.

14.15. This too seemed to me most strange: that he indeed who had voted the freedmen should be relegated, the slaves punished, was compelled to divide his opinion; but that this man who would punish the freedmen with death should be numbered with the one who relegated. For if it was right that one man's opinion should be divided, because it embraced two matters, I could not see how the opinions of two men, voting things so different, could be joined.

14.16. And so allow me, before you as if there, with the matter concluded as if still entire, to render the reasoning of my judgement, and to put together at leisure now what I then said piecemeal, with many interrupting.

14.17. Let us suppose that three judges in all were assigned to this case; that to one of these it had seemed good that the freedmen should perish, to another that they should be relegated, to the third that they should be acquitted. Will the two opinions, with combined forces, destroy the last, or will each separately be worth as much as the other, nor will the first be able to be joined with the second any more than the second with the third?

14.18. Therefore in the Senate too they ought to be counted as contrary which are spoken as different. But if one and the same man should vote both that they perish and that they be relegated, could they, by the opinion of one man, both perish and be relegated? Or, in short, would it be reckoned a single opinion that joined things so different?

14.19. How then, when one votes that they be punished, another that they be relegated, can it seem one opinion that is uttered by two, which would not seem one if uttered by one? What? Does not the law plainly teach that the opinions of him who kills and him who relegates ought to be separated, when it orders the division to be made thus: 'You who vote for this, go to this side; you who vote for everything else, go to that side as you think'? Examine each word and weigh it: 'you who vote for this,' that is, who think they should be relegated, 'to this side,' that is, to that on which he sits who voted that they be relegated.

14.20. From which it is manifest that those who think they should be killed cannot remain on the same side. 'You who vote for everything else': you observe how the law, not content to say 'else,' has added 'everything.' Is there any doubt, then, that those who would kill vote 'everything else' than those who would relegate? 'Go to that side as you think': does not the law itself seem to call, compel, and drive those who dissent to the opposite side? Does not the consul too, where each must remain, whither he must cross, not only by the solemn words but by hand and gesture point out?

14.21. But it will come about, you say, that if the opinions of him who kills and him who relegates are divided, the one that acquits will prevail. What is that to those who vote? Whom it certainly does not become to fight by every art, by every device, lest the milder course prevail. Yet those who punish and those who relegate ought first to be compared with the acquitters, and then with each other. Just as in certain spectacles the lot sets aside and reserves someone to contend with the victor, so in the Senate there are first contests and second; and of two opinions, the one that has come off superior the third awaits.

14.22. What of this, that, the first opinion approved, the rest are destroyed? By what reasoning, then, can there be not one and the same place for opinions, of which none has any after?

14.23. I will repeat it more plainly. Unless, when he who relegates speaks his opinion, those who would punish at once withdraw to another side at the very beginning, they will dissent in vain afterwards from him with whom shortly before they had agreed.

14.24. But why do I act like one teaching? when I wish to learn whether the opinions ought to be divided or to be taken singly. I obtained indeed what I demanded; none the less I ask whether I ought to have demanded it. How did I obtain it? He who thought the extreme penalty should be exacted, conquered — I know not whether by the law, but certainly by the equity of my demand — gave up his own opinion and went over to the one relegating, fearing, of course, lest, if the opinions were divided, as otherwise seemed likely to happen, the one voting acquittal should prevail by number. For there were far more in this one than in the two single ones.

14.25. Then those too who were drawn by his authority, deserted when he crossed over, abandoned the opinion forsaken by its own author, and followed, as though a deserter, the leader they had been following.

14.26. So out of three opinions two were made, and of the two one prevailed, the third being driven out, which, since it could not overcome both, chose by which of the two it should be defeated. Farewell.

15.1. I have burdened you with so many volumes sent at once; but I have burdened you, first, because you required it, then because you wrote that your vintage there was so scanty that I knew well you would have leisure, as the common saying goes, to read a book.

15.2. The same is reported from my little fields. So it will be lawful for me too to write what you may read, if only there be the means of buying paper; or else, of necessity, whatever we have written, good or bad, we shall delete. Farewell.

16.1. The illnesses of my people have worn me down — their deaths too, and those of young men at that. There are two consolations, by no means equal to so great a grief, yet consolations: one, the freedom of manumitting — for I seem not to have lost altogether before their time those whom I lost already free; the other, that I allow my slaves too to make wills, as it were, and observe them as legal.

16.2. They commend and ask what they please; I obey as if bidden. They divide, give, leave, so long as it be within the household; for to slaves the household is a kind of commonwealth and, as it were, a city.

16.3. But though I rest in these consolations, I am weakened and broken by that very humanity which led me to allow this very thing. Yet I should not on that account wish to become harder. Nor am I unaware that others call such mishaps nothing more than a loss, and on that account seem to themselves great men and wise. Whether they are great and wise, I do not know; men they are not.

16.4. For it is a man's part to be moved by grief, to feel, yet to resist and admit consolations — not to have no need of consolations. But of these things perhaps more than I should; yet fewer than I would. For there is a certain pleasure even in grieving, especially if you weep in the bosom of a friend, with whom your tears find either praise prepared or pardon. Farewell.

17.1. Is the sky with you too harsh and stormy? Here are continual tempests and frequent floods. The Tiber has overflowed its bed and pours deeply over its lower banks;

17.2. though drained off by the channel which the most provident Emperor made, it presses on the valleys, swims over the fields, and wherever the ground is level, is seen in place of the ground. Thence the rivers which it usually receives and carries down mixed with itself, it drives back as it were to meet them, and so covers with alien waters the fields it does not itself touch.

17.3. The Anio, most delicate of streams, and therefore, as it were, invited and detained by the villas adjoining it, has for the most part broken and swept away the woods that shade it; it has undermined hills, and, dammed in many places by the mass of what falls, while it seeks its lost path, has driven down houses and flung itself up and over the ruins.

17.4. Those whom that storm caught on higher ground have seen, in one place, the appointments of the rich and their heavy furniture; in another, the implements of the farm; here oxen, ploughs, drivers; there herds loosed and free; and among these, the trunks of trees, or the beams and roofs of villas, floating widely and in disorder.

17.5. Nor were even those places free from the calamity which the river did not reach. For in place of the river there was the ceaseless rain, and the whirlwinds hurled from the clouds; the works by which precious fields are enclosed were thrown down; monuments shaken and even overturned. Many were crippled, overwhelmed, crushed by such disasters, and the losses were increased by mourning.

17.6. Lest anything similar happen with you, I fear in proportion to the danger; and I ask you, if nothing of the kind has occurred, to relieve my anxiety as soon as possible — but even if such a thing has occurred, to announce that too. For it matters little whether you suffer adversity or expect it; except that there is a limit to grieving, none to fearing. For you grieve as much as you know has happened, but fear as much as may happen. Farewell.

18.1. It is surely false, what is commonly believed, that men's wills are the mirror of their characters, since Domitius Tullus appeared far better in death than in life.

18.2. For though he had given himself up to be courted by legacy-hunters, he left his daughter heir — who was common to him and to his brother, because he had adopted her, born of his brother. He honoured his grandchildren with very many and most welcome legacies, honoured even his great-granddaughter. In short, all was full of the utmost devotion, and the more unexpected for that.

18.3. So various were the conversations throughout the city: some called him false, ungrateful, forgetful, and, while they assailed him, betrayed themselves by the most disgraceful confessions, complaining of a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather as of one childless; others, on the contrary, extolled with praises this very thing, that he had cheated the wicked hopes of men, whom to deceive thus befits the manners of the age. They added too that it was not free to him to die by another will: for he had not left his wealth to his daughter, but given it back, having been enriched through his daughter.

18.4. For Curtilius Mancia, hating his son-in-law Domitius Lucanus — Tullus' brother — had made his daughter, Mancia's granddaughter, his heir on this condition, that she be released from her father's hand. The father released her, the uncle adopted her, and so, the will being circumvented, the brother and partner recalled the emancipated daughter into his brother's power by the fraud of adoption, and that with the most ample wealth.

18.5. It was otherwise, as it were, given to those brothers by fate that they should grow rich against the will of those by whom they were made so. Indeed Domitius Afer, who took them into his name, left a will declared eighteen years before, and afterwards so disapproved by himself that he had their father's property proscribed.

18.6. Wonderful was that man's harshness, wonderful these men's good fortune: his harshness, who struck from the number of the citizens one whom he had even as partner in his children; these men's good fortune, who succeeded in their father's place to the man who had taken their father away.

18.7. But this inheritance of Afer's too, like the rest gained together with his brother, was to be transmitted to the brother's daughter, by whom Tullus had been made sole heir and preferred to his daughter, that he might be reconciled. So the more praiseworthy is the will, which devotion, loyalty, and modesty wrote, in which, in short, to all the connections by marriage thanks were returned according to each one's office, returned to his wife too.

18.8. She received most charming villas, received much money — an excellent and most patient wife, and the better deserving of her husband the more she was reproached for marrying him. For a woman illustrious in birth, upright in character, declining in years, long a widow, once a mother, seemed to have followed too little becomingly a marriage with a rich old man so undone by disease that he might have been a weariness to a wife whom he had married young and sound.

18.9. For, distorted and broken in all his limbs, he surveyed his great wealth with his eyes alone, nor was he even moved in his bed except by others; indeed — foul and pitiable to tell — he offered his teeth to be washed and rubbed. He was often heard, when he complained of the indignities of his infirmity, to say that he daily licked the fingers of his own slaves.

18.10. Yet he lived and wished to live, sustained chiefly by his wife, who by perseverance had turned the blame of a marriage begun into glory.

18.11. You have all the tales of the city; for Tullus is the whole subject of all tales. The auction is awaited: for he was so wealthy that he furnished his most ample gardens, on the very day he bought them, with very many and most ancient statues; so many most beautiful works he had in his storehouses, which he neglected. In your turn, if anything there is worthy of a letter, do not grudge it.

18.12. For while men's ears are gladdened by novelty, we are instructed for the conduct of life by examples. Farewell.

19.1. Both my joy and my solace are in literature, and there is nothing so glad that these do not make it gladder, nothing so sad that it is not less sad through these. So, troubled by my wife's illness and the danger of my people, and indeed by the death of some, I fled to study as the one relief of grief, which makes me understand adversity more keenly but bear it more patiently.

19.2. It is my custom, with whatever I am about to put into men's hands, first to examine it by the judgement of my friends, above all by yours. So if ever, now give attention to the book which you will receive with this letter, because I fear that I, being sad, gave too little attention myself. For I could command grief that I should write, but not that I should write with a mind free and glad. Moreover, as joy comes from study, so studies come from cheerfulness. Farewell.

20.1. To learn the things for which we are used to set out on a journey and to cross the sea, we neglect when they are set before our eyes — whether because it is so ordered by nature that, careless of what is near, we pursue what is far off; or because all desire for things grows faint when the opportunity is easy; or because we put it off as though we should often see what it is given us to see whenever we wish to behold it.

20.2. For whatever cause, there are very many things in our city and near the city which we know not by our eyes only but not even by our ears, which, had Achaia, Egypt, Asia, or any other land fruitful in marvels and ready to commend them produced them, we should have heard, read, and surveyed.

20.3. I myself, at least, lately heard and saw at once what I had neither heard nor seen before. My wife's grandfather had required me to inspect his estates at Ameria. As I walked through them, there was shown me, lying below, a lake named Vadimon; and certain incredible things were told of it.

20.4. I came to it. The lake is shaped like a wheel lying flat, and equal on every side: no bay, no obliquity; all measured and even, and, as it were, hollowed and cut out by an artist's hand. The colour is whiter than azure, greener and deeper; there is a smell of sulphur and a medicinal taste; a power by which broken bones are made whole. Its extent is moderate, yet such as to feel the winds and to swell with waves.

20.5. No ship is on it — for it is sacred — but islands float upon it, all grassy with reed and rush, and whatever else a more fertile marsh and that very edge of the lake puts forth. Each has its own shape and size; the margin of all is rubbed smooth, because, often dashed against the shore or against one another, they wear and are worn. The height of all is equal, equal their lightness; for in the likeness of a keel they go down with a shallow base.

20.6. This is seen on every side, the same mass alike poised above the water and sunk in it. Sometimes joined and coupled they are like solid land; sometimes, the winds being at variance, they are dispersed; sometimes, left to themselves by the calm, they float singly.

20.7. Often the smaller cling to the greater, like little boats to merchant-ships; often the greater and smaller alike, as it were, undertake a course and a contest; then again, all driven to the same place, they push the land forward where they have stood, and now here, now there, give back and take away the lake, and only then, when they have held the middle, do they not contract it.

20.8. It is known that cattle, following the grass, are wont to advance onto those islands as onto the farthest bank, nor to perceive the moving ground until, snatched from the shore as if carried out and set there, they are frightened by the lake surrounding them on every side; then, going off whither the wind has borne them, they feel no more that they have descended than they had felt that they had ascended.

20.9. The same lake is poured out into a river, which, when it has shown itself a little to the eyes, is sunk in a cavern and flows deeply hidden; and, if it receives anything before it is drawn down, keeps and brings it forth.

20.10. These things I have written to you, because I believed them no less unknown to you than to me, and no less welcome. For natural works delight you as they do me, nothing equally. Farewell.

21.1. As in life so in study, I think it most beautiful and most humane to blend severity with courtesy, lest the one pass into gloom, the other into wantonness.

21.2. Led by this reasoning, I vary my graver works with light pieces and jests. To bring these forward I chose a most fitting time and place, and, that they might even now grow used to be heard both by men at leisure and in the dining-room, in the month of July, when lawsuits are most at rest, having set chairs before the couches, I placed my friends.

21.3. It chanced that on the same morning I was asked to a sudden advocacy, which gave me cause to speak a preface. For I begged that no one should reproach me as irreverent towards my work, because, being about to recite — though to friends and a few, that is, again to friends — I had not abstained from the forum and from business. I added that I follow this order in writing too, that I prefer necessities to pleasures, serious things to agreeable, and write first for my friends, then for myself.

21.4. The book was both various in little works and in metres. So we are wont, who trust our talent too little, to flee the danger of satiety. I recited for two days. This the approval of the hearers required; and yet, while others pass over certain things and reckon it to their credit that they pass them over, so I omit nothing, and even say that I do not omit anything. For I read everything that I may correct everything, which cannot happen to those who recite selected passages.

21.5. That, you say, is more modest and perhaps more reverent; but this is more open and more loving. For he loves who thinks himself so loved that he does not dread giving weariness; and, besides, what do companions afford, if they come together for their own pleasure's sake? He is fastidious and like a stranger who would rather hear a friend's book good than make it so.

21.6. I do not doubt that you, with your other affection for me, desire to read as soon as possible this book still new from the press. You shall read it, but revised — which was the cause of reciting it; and yet some parts of it you already know. These, corrected afterwards or — as sometimes happens with longer delay — made worse, you will recognize as if new and rewritten. For when very many things are changed, those too seem changed which remain. Farewell.

22.1. Do you know those men who, slaves to all lusts, are angry at others' vices as though they envied them, and most severely punish those whom they most imitate? — whereas nothing more becomes even those who need no one's clemency than gentleness.

22.2. And for my part I think that man best and most faultless who so forgives others as if he himself sinned daily, and so abstains from sin as if he forgave no one.

22.3. So this let us hold at home, this abroad, this in every kind of life: that we be implacable to ourselves, but easy to be entreated even by those who know not how to grant pardon save to themselves; and let us commit to memory what that gentlest and therefore greatest man Thrasea was often wont to say: 'He who hates vices, hates men.' You ask perhaps what has moved me to write this.

22.4. Lately a certain man — but better face to face; though not even then. For I fear lest, while I disapprove, to pursue, carp at, and report it should be at odds with that very thing I am at this moment teaching. Whoever he be, of whatever sort, let him be passed over in silence, whom to mark out matters nothing to the example, not to mark out matters much to humanity. Farewell.

23.1. Grief has taken from me, shaken off, snatched away all my studies, all my cares, all my distractions — grief most grievous, which I have conceived from the death of Junius Avitus.

23.2. He had assumed the broad stripe in my house, had been helped by my support in seeking offices; besides, he so loved me, so reverenced me, that he used me as the moulder of his character, as it were his master.

23.3. Rare is this in our young men. For how few yield as inferior either to another's age or to his authority? At once they are wise, at once they know everything, reverence no one, imitate no one, and are themselves their own examples. But not Avitus, whose chief prudence was this, that he thought others more prudent; whose chief learning, that he wished to learn.

23.4. He always consulted me about something, either concerning studies or the duties of life; he always withdrew the better for it; and he had become better either by what he had heard, or simply by what he had asked.

23.5. What obedience he showed to Servianus, a most exact man! whom, as legate, he so understood and won as tribune that, when he passed from Germany into Pannonia, he followed him not as a fellow-soldier but as a companion and attendant. With what industry, what modesty, as quaestor he was no less pleasant and welcome to his consuls — and he had several — than useful! With what running to and fro, what vigilance he sought this very aedileship, of which he was snatched before his time! Which above all exasperates my grief.

23.6. There hover before my eyes his vain labours, his fruitless prayers, and the honour which he only deserved; there returns to my mind that broad stripe assumed among my household gods, there return those my first and those my last votes for him, those talks, those consultations.

23.7. I am moved by his very youth, moved by the misfortune of his kinsfolk. He had a parent advanced in years, he had a wife whom a year before he had taken as a maiden, he had a daughter whom a little before he had acknowledged. So many hopes, so many joys one day turned to their opposite.

23.8. Lately designated aedile, a new husband, a new father, he left his office untouched, his mother bereaved, his wife widowed, his daughter an orphan, ignorant of her father. To my tears is added that, absent and ignorant of the impending evil, I learned at once that he was ill and at once that he was dead, lest I should grow used to so grievous a grief through fear. In such torments was I when I wrote this — so that this is all I wrote; for now I can neither think nor speak of anything else. Farewell.

24.1. My love for you compels me, not indeed to instruct — for you need no instructor — yet to admonish you to hold and observe what you know, or else it were better not to know it.

24.2. Consider that you have been sent to the province of Achaia, that true and pure Greece, in which civilization, letters, and even agriculture are believed first to have been discovered; sent to set in order the condition of free cities, that is, to men most fully men, to free men most fully free, who have kept by virtue, by merit, by friendship, in short by treaty and by religion, the right given them by nature.

24.3. Reverence the gods who founded them and the names of the gods; reverence their ancient glory and this very old age, which in a man is venerable, in cities sacred. Let there be with you honour for antiquity, for mighty deeds, for legends too. Take nothing from anyone's dignity, nothing from his liberty, nothing even from his vaunting.

24.4. Have before your eyes that this is the land which sent us our laws, which gave laws not to the conquered but to those who asked, that it is Athens you approach, Lacedaemon you govern; from whom to snatch the remaining shadow and surviving name of liberty is hard, cruel, barbarous.

24.5. You see how, though in sickness slave and free differ in nothing, doctors nevertheless treat the free more gently and kindly. Recall what each city once was, not so as to despise it for having ceased to be; let pride and harshness be far off.

24.6. Nor fear contempt. Is he despised who has command, who has the rods, unless he is base and sordid, and one who first despises himself? Ill does power test its strength by injuries to others, ill is reverence won by terror, and love is far more potent than fear for obtaining what you wish. For fear departs if you withdraw; love remains, and as the one turns into hatred, so the other into reverence.

24.7. You, indeed, again and again — for I will repeat it — ought to remember the very title of your office, and to interpret to yourself how great and of what kind it is to set in order the condition of free cities. For what is more civil than ordering, what more precious than liberty?

24.8. And then, how shameful, if ordering be changed into overthrow, liberty into servitude! Add that you have a contest with yourself: the fame of your quaestorship weighs upon you, which you brought back excellent from Bithynia; the testimony of the Emperor weighs upon you; your tribunate, praetorship, and this very legation given as it were a reward, weigh upon you.

24.9. So the more must you strive that you may not seem to have been more humane, better, more skilled in a far-off province than in one near the city, among subjects than among the free, sent by lot than by judgement, raw and unknown than tried and approved; since it is, besides — as you have often heard, often read — far more disgraceful to lose praise than not to attain it.

24.10. This I would have you believe, what I said at the beginning, that I have written admonishing, not instructing — though instructing too. For I do not fear lest in love I should have exceeded the measure. For there is no danger lest that be too much which ought to be the greatest. Farewell.