M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
should be handled as honourably as possible. I trust my advice will commend itself to you, for my goodwill you must commend. At any rate, I would rather fail in judgment by writing than fail in friendship by keeping silence. Farewell, my Fronto, most beloved and most loving of friends.
Fronto to my Lord Caesar.
Rightly have I devoted myself to you, rightly invested in you and your father all the gains of my life. What could be more friendly, what more delightful, what more true[1]? But I beseech you, away with your forward boys and rash counsellors! There is danger, forsooth, of anything you suggest being childishly conceived or ill-advised! Believe me, if you will—if not, I will for my part believe myself—that in good sense you leave your elders far behind. In fact, in this affair, I realise that your counsel is weighty and worthy of a greybeard, while mine is childish. For what is the good of providing a spectacle for friends and foes? If your Herodes be an honourable and moral man, it is not right that such a man[2] should be assailed[3] with invectives by me; if he is wicked and worthless, my fight with him is not on equal terms, nor do we stand to lose the same. For any contact with what is unclean
- ↑ Fronto is probably punning on Marcus's name Verus. Hadrian gave him the pet name of Verissimus, which Justin Martyr also uses, and it appears on the coins of Tyras on the Euxine.
- ↑ We can scarcely keep the assonance: "It is not right that such a wight."
- ↑ Lit. "keep at a distance with darts."
