M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
of success. Nor, indeed, did I care for the alternative, to feel one thing and utter another. What, Lucius to make pretences to Fronto! from whom I do not hesitate to say I have learnt simplicity and the love of truth far before the lesson of polite phrasing. Indeed, by the compact also, which has long subsisted between us, I think I am sufficiently qualified for receiving pardon. At all events, when in spite of repeated appeals from me you never wrote, I was sorry, by heaven, but, remembering our compact, not angry. Finally, why say more, that I seem not rather to justify myself than to entreat you? I have been in fault, I admit it; against the last person, too, that deserved it: that, too, I admit. But you must be better than I. I have suffered enough punishment, first in the very fact that I am conscious of my fault, then because, though face to face I could have won your pardon in a moment, I must now, separated as I am from you by such wide lands, be tortured with anxiety for so many intervening months until you get my letter and I get your answer back. I present to you as suppliants in my favour humanity herself, for even to offend is human, and it is man's peculiar privilege to pardon . . . .[† 1][1]
Fronto to Marcus
To my Lord Antoninus Augustus.
I have seen your little chicks,[2] and a more welcome sight I shall never in my life see, so like in features to you that nothing can be more like than the
- ↑ A second deprecator was probably Marcus.
- ↑ The twins Lucius Aurelius Commodus and Antoninus Geminus, born at Lanuvium on August 31, 161. The latter died in 165.
- ↑ This word is from the margin of Cod. Mommsen says at least two leaves are lost between this word and the mutilated beginning of Ad Verum, ii. 3.
