W hat excuse1 of mine can win your pardon for my not having written to you all this time, if it be not by my stating the true cause of my want of leisure, that I had composed a speech about our great Emperor? The Roman saw bids us "not hate a friend's ways but ken them."2 What mine are I will tell you, and not conceal them. From my great natural incapacity and worthlessness I labour under much the same defect as the animal called by the Romans a hyena, whose neck, they say, can be stretched out straight forward but cannot be bent to either side.3 So I, when I am putting together anything with more than usual care, am, in a way, immovable, and, giving up all else, aim at that alone, like the hyena not turning to the right hand or to the left. Again, they say that the snakes called "darters"4 in much the same way project themselves straight forwards, but never move sideways; and spears and arrows are most likely to hit the mark when they are propelled straight, neither made to swerve by the wind, nor foiled by Athene's hand or Apollo's, as were the arrows shot by Teucer or the suitors.
These three similes, then, have I applied to myself, two of them fierce and savage, that of the hyena and that of the snake, and a third drawn from missiles, it, too, non-human and harsh. And if, indeed, I were to say that of winds the one astern was especially to be commended because it takes a ship straight forward nor lets it make leeway, this would be a fourth simile, and that a forcible one. And if I added this also of the line, that the straight line is the chiefest of all lines, I should produce a fifth simile, not only inanimate like that of the spears, but this one also incorporeal.
What simile, then, can be found convincing? One above all that is human, better still if it be also cultured; and if it partake, too, of friendship and love, the simile would be all the more a similitude. They say that Orpheus rued his turning to look back: had he looked and walked straight ahead he had not rued. Enough of similes. For this, too, is somewhat unconvincing, this simile of Orpheus fetched up from Hades.
But I will now for the rest plead in excuse what will most easily win me pardon. What, then, is this? That in writing the Emperor's encomium I was doing, in the first place, what was especially gratifying to you and your son; in the next I remembered and mentioned both of you in the composition, just as lovers name their darlings over every cup. But, indeed, the craftmanship of similes is an insinuating thing and grows on us. This one, at any rate, has occurred to me, which I add to all the others, and irideed it can most fairly be called a simile (or likeness), being taken from a painter. Protogenes the painter is said to have taken eleven5 years to paint his Ialysus, painting nothing but the Ialysus all those eleven years. But, as for me, I painted not one but two Ialysuses at once, being no ordinary ones either of them, nor easy to depict, not only in respect of their faces and figures, but also of their characters and qualities, for the one is the great Imperator of all land and sea, and the other the great Imperator's son, his child in the same way as Athene is of Zeus, but thy son as Hephaestus is of Hera. But let there be no "halting"6 in this simile from Hephaestus. This defence of mine, then, would seem to be wholly verisimilous and picturesque, full as it is in itself of similes entirely.
It remains that I should, after the fashion of geometers, ask—what? If any word in this letter be obsolete or barbarous, or in any other way unauthorized, or not entirely Attic, look not at that, but only, I beseech you, at the intrinsic meaning of the word, for you know that I do spend time on mere words or mere idiom. And, indeed, it is said that the famous Scythian Anacharsis was by no means perfect in his Attic, but was praised for his meaning and his conceptions. I will compare myself, then, with Anacharsis, not, by heaven, in wisdom, but as being like him a barbarian. For he was a Scythian of the nomad Scythians, and I am a Libyan of the Libyan nomads. I as well as Anacharsis may browse fresh pastures, bleat therefore as well as he while browsing, just as one wills to bleat. See, I have assimilated barbarism to bleating. So will I make an end of writing nothing but similes.
143 A.D.
M. Caesar to his master.