I have refrained from relating to you myself all that had necessarily to be set right or provided for in good time, or quickly remedied or carefully arranged.1 Make allowance for my scrupulosity, if shackled with urgent cares I have dealt first with the business in hand and, counting on your good-natured indulgence towards me, have meanwhile given up writing. Pardon my reliance on our love if I have fought shy of describing my measures in detail, liable as they were to daily alteration and while the issue was still doubtful and all forecast precarious. Accept, I beseech you, the reason for so legitimate a delay. Why, then, write to others oftener than to you? To excuse myself shortly: because, in fact, did I not do so, they would be angry, you would forgive; they would give up writing, you would importune me; to them I rendered duty for duty, to you I owed love for love. Or would you wish me to write you also letters unwillingly, grumblingly, hurriedly, from necessity rather than from choice? Now why, you will say, not from choice? Because not even yet has anything been accomplished such as to make me wish to invite you to share in the joy. I did not care, I confess, to make one so very dear to me, and one whom I would wish to be always happy, a partner in anxieties which night and day made me utterly wretched,2 and almost brought me to despair of success. Nor, indeed, did I care for the alternative, to feel one thing and utter another. What, Lucius to make pretences to Fronto! from whom I do not hesitate to say I have learnt simplicity and the love of truth far before the lesson of polite phrasing. Indeed, by the compact also, which has long subsisted between us, I think I am sufficiently qualified for receiving pardon. At all events, when in spite of repeated appeals from me you never wrote, I was sorry, by heaven, but, remembering our compact, not angry. Finally, why say more, that I seem not rather to justify myself than to entreat you? I have been in fault, I admit it; against the last person, too, that deserved it: that, too, I admit. But you must be better than I. I have suffered enough punishment, first in the very fact that I am conscious of my fault, then because, though face to face I could have won your pardon in a moment, I must now, separated as I am from you by such wide lands, be tortured with anxiety for so many intervening months until you get my letter and I get your answer back. I present to you as suppliants in my favour humanity herself, for even to offend is human, and it is man's peculiar privilege to pardon . . . .34
Fronto to Marcus
163 A.D.
To my Lord Antoninus Augustus.