M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
pleasure. This is one proof of my love, taken from the Annals,[1] a poetical and certainly a dreamy one. Listen to another, a quarrelsome and contentious one this time. I have occasionally inveighed against you behind your back in somewhat strong terms before a very few of my most intimate friends. Time was I did this, when you went about in public gatherings with too serious a face,[2] as when you used to read books either in the theatre[3] or at a banquet—nor was I then refraining from theatres, nor as yet from banquets—on such occasions, then, I would call you an austere[4] and unreasonable, even at times, stung by anger, a disagreeable sort of person. But if anyone else found fault with you in my hearing with similar detraction, I could not listen to him with any patience. So it was easier for me to say this of you myself than to suffer others to speak any ill of you: just as I could more easily strike my daughter Gratia myself than see her struck by another.
4. I will add the third of my trifles. You know how in all money-changer's bureaus, booths, bookstalls, eaves, porches, windows, anywhere and everywhere there are likenesses of you exposed to view, badly enough painted most of them to be sure, and modelled or carved in a plain, not to say sorry, style of art, yet at the same time your likeness, however much a caricature, never when I go out meets my eyes without making me part my lips for a smile and dream of you.
- ↑ Of Eunius.
- ↑ cp. Capit. Vit. Marci, iv. 8, 10.
- ↑ ibid. xv. 1, and cp. Thoughts, vi. 46.
- ↑ Capit. xxii. 5: quia durus videbatur ex, philosophiae institutione.
