M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
nature of my means[1] and his straitened circumstances have forced me to banish him against his will into Syria to secure the legacies which have come to him under the will of a very dear friend.
5. This want of means has been the lot of my friend Clarus from no fault of his own*, for he received no benefit from either his father's or his mother's estate; the only result of his being his father's heir was that he found difficulty in paying his father's creditors. But by economy and attention to duty and frugality he discharged all his obligations as quaestor, aedile, and praetor, and whereas your deified father paid out from your privy purse[2] the expenses of his praetorship in his absence, as soon as ever Clarus recovered his health and came back to Rome he paid in the whole amount to the imperial treasury.
6. Nothing can be more conscientious than the man, nothing more reasonable, nothing more unassuming; generous also, if I am any authority, and considering the slenderness of his resources as open-handed as his means permit. His characteristics, simplicity, continence, truthfulness, an honour plainly Roman, a warmth of affection,[3] however, possibly not Roman, for there is nothing of which my whole life through I have seen less at Rome than a man unfeignedly φιλόστοργος. The reason why there is not even a word for this virtue in our language must, I imagine, be, that in reality no one at Rome has any warm affection.
7. This is the man, my Lord, whom I commend to
- ↑ Yet according to Aul. Gellius he could spend more than £3,000 on a bath (Gell xix. 10, § 4).
- ↑ cp. Capit. Pii Vit. viii. 4.
- ↑ Especially between parents and children. See i. p. 281 and Marcus, Thoughts, i. 11, and Justinian, Inst. ii. 18 pr.
