M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
you love me so. What benefit has your Fronto bestowed upon you so great that you should shew him such affection? Has he given up his life for you and your parents? Has he braved perils vicariously in your stead? Has he been the faithful governor of some province? Has he commanded an army? Nothing of the kind. Not even those everyday duties about your person does he discharge more than others; nay, he is, if you wish the truth, remiss enough. For neither does he haunt your house at daybreak, nor pay his respects to you daily, nor attend you everywhere, nor keep you always in sight. See to it then that, if anyone ask you why you love Fronto, you have an easy answer ready.
4. And yet there is nothing I like better than that there should be no reason for your love of me. For that seems to me no love at all which springs from reason and depends on actual and definite causes: by love I understand such as is fortuitous and free and subject to no cause, conceived by impulse rather than by reason, that needs no services, as a fire logs, for its kindling, but glows with self-engendered heat. To me the steaming grottoes of Baiae are better than your bath-furnaces, in which the fire is kindled with cost and smoke, and anon goes out. But the natural heat of the former is at once pure and perpetual, as grateful as it is gratuitous. Just in the same way your rational friendship, kept alight with services, not unfrequently means smoke and watery eyes: relax your efforts for an instant and out they go: but love fortuitous is eternal and enchanting.
5. Again, friendship that is won by desert has no such growth or firm texture as the love that is
