The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [50]
7. I have been thirteen days at Brundisium in the house of Laenius, an excellent man, who has despised the risk to his own safety to keep me safe,
8. Nor has he been induced by the penalty of a most iniquitous law to refuse me the rights and good offices of hospitality and friendship.
9. May I sometime have the opportunity of repaying him! Feel gratitude I always shall.
10. What a fall! What a disaster! What can I say? Should I ask you to come – a woman of weak health and broken heart? Should I refrain from asking you? Am I to be without you, then?
11. I think the best course is this: if there is any hope of my restoration, stay to promote it and push the thing on:
12. But if, as I fear, it proves hopeless, pray come to me by any means in your power.
13. Be sure of this, that if I have you I shall not think myself wholly lost. But what is to become of our beloved daughter Tullia?
14. You must see to that now: I can think of nothing. But certainly, however things turn out, we must do everything to promote that poor girl’s happiness and reputation.
15. Again, what is my son to do? Let him, at any rate, be ever in my bosom and in my arms.
16. I cannot write more. A fit of weeping hinders me. I do not know how you have got on; whether you are left in possession of anything, or have been, as I fear, entirely plundered.
17. To your advice that I should keep up my courage and not give up hope of recovering my position, I say that I only wish there were any grounds for such a hope.
18. As it is, when, alas! shall I get a letter from you? Who will bring it me? I would have waited for it at Brundisium, but the sailors would not allow it, being unwilling to lose a favourable wind.
19. For the rest, put as dignified a face on the matter as you can, my dear Terentia.
20. Our life is over: we have had our day: it is not any fault of ours that has ruined us, but our virtue.
21. I have made no false step, except in not losing my life when I lost my honours.
22. But since our children asked me to keep living, let us bear everything else, however intolerable.
23. And yet I, who encourage you, cannot encourage myself.
24. Take the greatest care of your health, and believe me that I am more affected by your distress than my own.
25. My dear Terentia, most faithful and best of wives, and my darling daughter, and that last hope of my race, young Cicero, goodbye!
Chapter 14
1. Brother! My brother! Did you really fear that I had been induced by anger not to write to you? Or even that I did not wish to see you?
2. I to be angry with you! Is it possible for me to be angry with you? Why, one would think that it was you that brought me low!
3. Your enemies, your unpopularity, that miserably ruined me, and not I that unhappily ruined you!
4. The fact is, the much-praised consulate of mine has deprived me of you, of children, country, fortune; from you I should hope it will have taken nothing but myself.
5. From you I have experienced nothing but what was honourable and gratifying: from me you have grief for my fall and fear for yourself, and regret, mourning, desertion.
6. I not wish to see you? The truth is rather that I was unwilling to be seen by you.
7. For you would not have seen your brother – not the brother you had left, not the brother you knew,
8. Not him to whom you had with mutual tears bidden farewell as he followed you on your departure for your province:
9. Not a trace even or faint image of him, but rather what I may call the likeness of a living corpse.
10. And oh! that you had sooner seen me or heard of me as a corpse!
11. Oh that I could have left you to survive, not my life merely, but my undiminished rank!
12. But I call everyone to witness that the one argument which recalled me from death was, that all declared that to some extent your life depended upon mine.
13. In which matter I made an error and acted culpably. For if I had taken my life, my death would have given clear evidence of my fidelity and love to you.
14. As it is, I have allowed you to be deprived