M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
than as an orator. When I smile, he turns up his nose. Anyone, he says, can sit yawning beside a judge, but to be a judge is indeed to do noble work. This is meant for me! However the affair has turned out finely. All is well: I rejoice. Your coming makes me happy and at the same time uneasy. Why happy, it needs not to enquire: wherefore uneasy I will, 'fore heaven, avow to you. For with plenty of time on my hands I have not given an atom of it to the task you gave me to write. Ariston's[1] books just now treat me well and at the same time make me feel ill. When they teach me a better way, then, I need not say, they treat me well; but when they shew me how far short my character comes of this better way, time and time again does your pupil blush and is angry with himself, for that, twenty-five years old as I am,[2] no draught has my soul yet drunk of noble doctrines and purer principles. Therefore I do penance, am wroth with myself, am sad, compare myself with others, starve myself. A prey to these thoughts at this time, I have put off each day till the morrow the duty of writing. But now I will think out something, and as a certain Athenian orator once warned an assembly of his countrymen, that the laws must sometimes be allowed to sleep,[3] I will make my peace with Ariston's works and allow them to lie still awhile, and after reading some of Tully's minor speeches I will devote myself entirely to your stage poet.[4] However, I can only write on one side or the other, for as to my defend-
- ↑ A Stoic philosopher, but with leanings to Platonism. His system, like that of Marcus subsequently, concerned itself only with ethics.
- ↑ This was written, therefore, between April 26, 146, and April 26, 147.
- ↑ See Plut. Ages. 30.
- ↑ Supposed by some to be Plautus.
