B.C. 46, ÆT. 60 if I ever get myself sufficiently free to be able to come to your parts, I won't let you think that you haven't sufficient notice from me.
CCCCLXXVII (F IX, 26)
TO L. PAPIRIUS PÆTUS (AT NAPLES)
Rome (August?)
I have just lain down to dinner at three o'clock, when I scribble
a copy of this note to you in my pocket-book.[1] You will
say, "where?" With Volumnius Eutrapelus. One place above
me is Atticus, one below Verrius, both friends of yours. Do
you wonder that our slavery is made so gay? Well, what am
I to do? I ask your advice as the pupil of a philosopher.[2]
Am I to be miserable, to torment myself? What should I
get by that? And, moreover, how long? "Live with your
books," say you. Well, do you suppose that I do anything
else? Or could I have kept alive, had I not lived with my
books? But even to them there is, I don't say a surfeit, but
a certain limit. When I have left them, though I care very
little about my dinner—the one problem which you put
before the philosopher Dion—still, what better to do with
my time before taking myself off to bed I cannot discover.
Now listen to the rest. Below Eutrapelus lay Cytheris.[3] At such a party as that, say you, was the famous Cicero,
"To whom all looked with rev'rence, on whose face
Greeks turned their eyes with wonder?"
To tell you the truth, I had no suspicion that she would be
- ↑ No doubt for his amanuensis to copy. Writing letters at the dinner table seems to have been no unusual thing with busy men. It was Cæsar's constant habit (Plut. Cæs. 63). And we have already heard of letters being delivered both to host and guest at dinner (p. 76).
- ↑ Dion, a Stoic (Acad. ii. 4, § 12).
- ↑ Of whom we have heard as accompanying Antony in his round of the Italian cities in B.C. 49 (vol. ii., p. 389). In the 2nd Philippic (§ 58) Cicero says her connexion with Volumnius was so notorious, that she was addressed then as Volumnia. Cytheris was her theatrical name.
