M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
What, again, do you think of that, of which its most eloquent advocate says what?
Sweet dreamless sleep, death's counterfeit.[1]
6. Enough of this trifling which I have indulged in more from love of you than from my own faith in it. Now after soundly abusing sleep, I am off to sleep: for I have spun all this out for you in the evening. I hope sleep will not pay me out.
Fronto to his Lord Marcus Caesar.
1. On my return home I received your letter which you had, of course, written to me at Rome, and to Rome it had gone; then it was brought back to-day and delivered to me a little while ago. In it, with many happy arguments, you confute the little I had said for sleep so cleverly, so subtly and aptly, that if wakefulness brings you such sharpness and wit,[2] I would absolutely prefer you to keep awake. But, indeed, you confess that you wrote in the evening just before going to sleep. It was the near approach, therefore, and overshadowing of sleep that produced so felicitous a letter. For, like the saffron, sleep, ere it comes close, sheds its fragrance from afar and delights at a distance.
2. To begin, then, with the opening of your letter, collusion with sleep, as you term it, is most happy . . . .[† 1] the word[3] is so apt that, were it withdrawn,
- ↑ Odyss. xiii. 80.
- ↑ In a fragment of a letter to Marcus as emperor, Charisius, Ars Grammatica, ii. 223, 8, quotes from Fronto adest etiam usque, quaque tibi natura situs lepos et venustas.
- ↑ This must refer to some word in the lost pages, not to praevaricor, which characterizes Marcus' treatment of the theme in general.
- ↑ Two pages are lost here.
