S o without end, Caesar, is your love for this Fronto of yours, that for all your eloquence words are scarcely forthcoming fully to express your love and set forth your goodwill. What, I ask you, can be more fortunate, what more happy than I alone am, to whom you send such glowing letters? Nay, more, and this is peculiar to lovers, you wish to run, aye, to fly, to me.
My Lady, your mother, is wont at times to say in fun that she envies me for being loved so much by you. What if she read this letter of yours, in which you even beseech the gods and invoke them with vows for my health? O, happy that I am! commended by your lips to the gods! Can any pain, think you, find its way into body or mind of mine to count against delight so great? . . . . hurrah! No longer do I feel any pain, nor any distress: I am whole, I am well, I leap for joy; whither you wish, I will come; whither you wish, I will run. Believe me when I say that I was so steeped in delight as not to be able to answer your letter at once; but the letter, indeed, which I had already written in answer to your previous one, I have sent off to you. However, I have kept back the second messenger that I might recover from my joy. And lo, the night has passed, a second day is already here which is already almost spent, and still what and how to write back to you I find not. For what professions of mine could be more sweetly, what more winningly, what more lovingly expressed than yours for me? And so I rejoice that you make me ungrateful and put a due requital beyond my powers, since, as the matter stands, your affection for me is so great that I can scarcely exceed your love.
Therefore, to provide some matter for a longer letter, let me ask you for what desert of mine you love me so. What benefit has your Fronto bestowed upon you so great that you should shew him such affection? Has he given up his life for you and your parents? Has he braved perils vicariously in your stead? Has he been the faithful governor of some province? Has he commanded an army? Nothing of the kind. Not even those everyday duties about your person does he discharge more than others; nay, he is, if you wish the truth, remiss enough. For neither does he haunt your house at daybreak, nor pay his respects to you daily, nor attend you everywhere, nor keep you always in sight. See to it then that, if anyone ask you why you love Fronto, you have an easy answer ready.
And yet there is nothing I like better than that there should be no reason for your love of me. For that seems to me no love at all which springs from reason and depends on actual and definite causes: by love I understand such as is fortuitous and free and subject to no cause, conceived by impulse rather than by reason, that needs no services, as a fire logs, for its kindling, but glows with self-engendered heat. To me the steaming grottoes of Baiae are better than your bath-furnaces, in which the fire is kindled with cost and smoke, and anon goes out. But the natural heat of the former is at once pure and perpetual, as grateful as it is gratuitous. Just in the same way your rational friendship, kept alight with services, not unfrequently means smoke and watery eyes: relax your efforts for an instant and out they go: but love fortuitous is eternal and enchanting.
Again, friendship that is won by desert has no such growth or firm texture as the love that is sudden and at first sight. So in orchards and gardens the growth of shrubs, reared and watered by hand, is not like that of the oak and the fir and the alder1 and the cedar and the pine on their native hills which, springing up self-sown and set without plan and without order, owe nothing to the toil or services of a planter, but are fostered by the wind and the rain.
That love of yours, therefore, unplanted and sprung up without reason, will, I trust, grow steadily on with the cedars and the oaks; whereas if it were cherished by reason of services done, it would not outgrow the myrtles and the bays, which have scent enough but too little strength. In a word, love spontaneous is as superior to love earned by service as fortune is to reason.
But who is there knows not that reason is a term for human judgment, while Fortuna is a goddess and the chief of goddesses? that temples, fanes, and shrines have been dedicated to Fortuna2 all the world over, while to Reason has been consecrated neither image nor altar anywhere? I cannot be wrong then in preferring that your love for me should be born rather of fortune than of reason.
Indeed reason can never compare with fortune either in grandeur or utility or worth. For neither can you match your pyramids, raised by hand and reason, against the hills, nor your aqueducts against the rivers, nor your cisterns against the fountains. Again, reason that guides our actions is called wisdom, the intuition of the seer is named divination. Nor is there anyone who would rather put faith in the wisest of women than in the oracles of the Sibyl. What is the drift of all this? To shew that I do right in preferring to be loved by intuition and chance rather than by reason and my desert. Wherefore, even if there is any adequate reason for your love for me, I beseech you, Caesar, let us take diligent pains to conceal and ignore it. Let men doubt, discuss, dispute, guess, puzzle over the origin of our love as over the fountains of the Nile.
It is now close on four o'clock and your messenger is muttering. So my letter must end. I am really much better than I expected; I have given up all idea of waters. Dearly do I love you, my Lord, the glory of our age, my chiefest solace. You will say, Not surely more than I love you? I am not so ungrateful as to dare say that. Farewell, Caesar, and your parents too, and cultivate your abilities to the full.
Baiae, 143 A.D.
M. Caesar to his master Fronto, greeting.