M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
the wise, has her share of virtues, is the teacher of mildness, shielded from traps, welcomed in well-doing, pardoned in faults, and, finally, pronounced golden. Who pray prevents us from painting-in much colour from the paint-box of our friend Favorinus[1]? The more a woman relies on her looks, the more easily does she neglect her complexion and her coiffure; but with most women it is because they distrust their beauty that all the alluring devices which care can discover are brought into being that they may particularly adorn themselves.
4. The myrtle and the box and all the other shrubs and bushes that submit to the shears, accustomed as they are to being most diligently and carefully pruned, watered, and trimmed, creep on the ground, or raise their tops but little over the soil where they stand; but those unshorn firs and neglected pines hide their aspiring heads amid the clouds.
5. Lions are not so diligent in seeking their food and procuring their prey as ants, while spiders are more diligent in weaving than any Penelope or Andromache. And altogether insignificant abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[† 1] How small a part, I ask you, of the Lucullan . . . . . . . .
- ↑ A philosopher and rhetorician of Arles, a friend of the emperor Hadrian and of Herodes Atticus and Fronto.
- ↑ The gap to statuit is half a column, from there to aureo about thirteen lines, and eleven lines are lost after aureo.
