- cause he seemed to me to give great promise of supreme
excellence, honesty, and eloquence; and partly because he lived with me in the most complete sympathy, not only from our mutual services of friendship, but also from a community of literary tastes. I need not write at greater length. How bound I am to protect his safety and property by every means in my power you see. It only remains, since I know from many circumstances what your sentiments are as to the fortune of the loyalists and the disasters to the Republic, that I should beg nothing of you except that to the goodwill, which you are sure spontaneously to entertain towards him, there may be added a supplement proportionate to the value which I know you have for me. You cannot oblige me more than by doing this. Good-bye.
DXXVII (F V, 16)
TO TITIUS[1]
(Rome)
Though of all the world I am by far the least fitted to offer
you consolation, because your sorrow has caused me so
much pain that I needed consolation myself, yet since my
sorrow was farther removed from the acuteness of the
deepest grief than your own, I have resolved that our close
connexion and my warm feelings for you make it in-*
- ↑ We cannot tell which of the Titii, of whom several occur in the
correspondence, this is, nor when the letter was written. The mention
of the pestilential year might tempt us to put it in B.C. 43 (Dio, 45, 17);
but then pestilences were frequent in Rome, and the general tone in
regard to public affairs seems rather in unison with the other letters of
B.C. 46, and one would have expected some allusion to his own loss if it
had been written after Tullia's death. The letter has the air of a
"commonplace," a sort of model of ordinary condolence:
"One writes that 'other friends remain':
That 'loss is common to the race':
And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain."
