M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
the wisest of women than in the oracles of the Sibyl. What is the drift of all this? To shew that I do right in preferring to be loved by intuition and chance rather than by reason and my desert. Wherefore, even if there is any adequate reason for your love for me, I beseech you, Caesar, let us take diligent pains to conceal and ignore it. Let men doubt, discuss, dispute, guess, puzzle over the origin of our love as over the fountains of the Nile.
9. It is now close on four o'clock and your messenger is muttering. So my letter must end. I am really much better than I expected; I have given up all idea of waters. Dearly do I love you, my Lord, the glory of our age, my chiefest solace. You will say, Not surely more than I love you? I am not so ungrateful as to dare say that. Farewell, Caesar, and your parents too, and cultivate your abilities to the full.
M. Caesar to his master Fronto, greeting.
1. Hear now a very few points in favour of wakefulness against sleep[1]: and yet methinks I am guilty of collusion, in that I side with sleep night and day without ceasing: I desert him not, nor is he likely to desert me, such cronies are we. But my hope is that he may be huffed at my indictment of him and leave me for a little space, and give me a chance at last of burning some midnight oil. Now for subtle arguments: of which[2] my first, indeed,
- ↑ This letter is evidently an answer to a Pro Somno of Fronto's. By "collusion" he means being really in favour of sleep while pretending to plead against it.
- ↑ If we keep Hauler's reading of the Codex eiusdem, the pronoun would seem to refer to Theodoras (see p. 38), for we can hardly assent to Hauler's view that σκιλα refers to Squilla Gallicanus, to whom there is a letter below, Ad Am. i. 25.
