M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
be happy, I could find it more easy to believe that he would be happy than that he would be able, while baking in the brass, to muse the while on an exordium or write pointed phrases.
Then when after a long interval I had recovered my health, I turned to other matters in preference. I took a dislike to that speech, and will not be ashamed to confess hatred and aversion . . . . . . . . So the speech has come back home to me after I had publicly disowned it, and taken up its abode with me again . . . . . .. . . . . .
Fronto to Praecilius Pompeianus,[1] greeting.
My very dear friend Pompeianus, read . . . . . . . . Venetus[2] is for sale. You know that it is the perpetual fate of Venetus to be always going, never gone . . . . . . . . He writes in answer that he has never received my letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fronto to Claudius Julianus, greeting.
You have had then at home, my Naucellius,[3] . . . . Our friendship has been on such a footing that we could dispense with these conventional
- ↑ There was another letter to him in this collection (Naber, p. 172), but only the opening words remain (from the Index, as read by Hauler, Wien. Stud. 33, pt. 1, p. 175): Labris cius labra fovi, I kissed him lip to lip.
- ↑ Venetus may be a proper name, or = Venetianus (i.e. a partizan of the "Blues" in the Circus), or mean a Venetian.
- ↑ One of the names of Julianus, who was consul under Pius and provincial legate under Marcus.
