G ood heavens! how shocked I was on reading the beginning of your letter! It was written in such a way that I thought some danger to your health was meant. Then, when the danger, which at the beginning of your note I had taken to be yours, was shewn to be your daughter Faustina's, how transformed was my apprehension. Yet not merely transformed, but in some subtle way a little relieved. You may say, Did my daughter's danger seem of less account to you than mine? Could it so seem to you, who protest that "Faustina is to you as a limpid light, as a gala day, as a near and dear hope, as a wish fulfilled, as an unalloyed delight, as a glory noble and assured"? I know, indeed, what came into my mind on reading your letter, but why it came to be so I do not know: I do not know, I say, why I was more shocked at your danger than at your daughter's, unless, perchance, though things be equally bad, yet those seem worse which are the first to fall on our ears. What is, in fact, the cause of this you are more likely to know, for about the nature and feelings of men your knowledge is somewhat wider than mine, and you have learnt your lesson better. Tolerably well trained as I was by my master and parent Athenodotus in the nice apprehension by the mind and application of illustrations and, as it were, similes of things, which he called εἰκόνας, I think I have hit upon the following simile of this kind, to explain the fact that the transference of my fear seemed an alleviation of it—that much the same thing happens to those who, carrying a heavy weight on their shoulder, transfer it from the right shoulder to the left, so that, though the burden remains as it was, yet the transference of the pressure seems even a relief.
Now, since you have quite dispelled all my fear and anxiety by the last part of your letter, in which you announced that Faustina was now somewhat better,1 it seems the very time for a little easy and unconstrained chat with you on my love for you; for those who are freed from a great fear and apprehension are generally allowed to indulge in a little playfulness and frivolity. I feel how dearly I love you, as much from weighty and serious proofs as also from many trifles. What these trifles are, and of what nature, I will point out.
Whenever "with soft slumber's chains around me," as the poet says, I see you in my dreams, there is never a time but I embrace and kiss you: then, according to the tenor of each dream, I either weep copiously or am transported with some great joy and pleasure. This is one proof of my love, taken from the Annals,2 a poetical and certainly a dreamy one. Listen to another, a quarrelsome and contentious one this time. I have occasionally inveighed against you behind your back in somewhat strong terms before a very few of my most intimate friends. Time was I did this, when you went about in public gatherings with too serious a face,3 as when you used to read books either in the theatre4 or at a banquet—nor was I then refraining from theatres, nor as yet from banquets—on such occasions, then, I would call you an austere5 and unreasonable, even at times, stung by anger, a disagreeable sort of person. But if anyone else found fault with you in my hearing with similar detraction, I could not listen to him with any patience. So it was easier for me to say this of you myself than to suffer others to speak any ill of you: just as I could more easily strike my daughter Gratia myself than see her struck by another.
I will add the third of my trifles. You know how in all money-changer's bureaus, booths, bookstalls, eaves, porches, windows, anywhere and everywhere there are likenesses of you exposed to view, badly enough painted most of them to be sure, and modelled or carved in a plain, not to say sorry, style of art, yet at the same time your likeness, however much a caricature, never when I go out meets my eyes without making me part my lips for a smile and dream of you.
Now to call a truce to my trifles and to return to seriousness; this letter of yours served in no small degree to shew the depth of my love for you, since I was more shocked at your danger than your daughter's, whereas, in other respects, I should wish you, indeed, to survive for my sake, but your daughter also for yours, as is right. But hark you, see that you do not turn informer or appear as a witness before your daughter, to make her think that I love you more than her; for there is a danger of your daughter being put out in consequence, as she is a serious and old-fashioned lady, and when I ask for her hands and feet to kiss, of her drawing them away from pique at this, or tendering them grudgingly: whose tiny hands and plump little feet I shall then kiss, by heaven, with more zest than your royal neck and your honest and merry lips.
145–147 A.D.
To my master.