G o on, threaten as much as you please and attack me with hosts of arguments, yet shall you never drive your lover, I mean me, away; nor shall I the less assert that I love Fronto, or love him the less, because you prove with reasons so various and so vehement that those who are less in love must be more helped and indulged. So passionately, by Hercules, am I in love with you, nor am I frightened off by the law you lay down, and even if you shew yourself more forward and facile to others, who are non-lovers, yet will I love you while I have life and health.
For the rest, having regard to the close packing of ideas, the inventive subtilties, and the felicity of your championship of your cause, I hardly like, indeed, to say that you have far outstripped those Atticists, so self-satisfied and challenging, and yet I cannot but say so. For I am in love and this, if nothing else, ought, I think, verily to be allowed to lovers, that they should have greater joy in the triumph of their loved ones. Ours, then, is the triumph, ours, I say. Is it . . . .1 preferable to talk philosophy under ceilings rather than under plane-trees, within the city bounds than without its walls, scorning delights than with Lais herself sitting at our side or sharing our home? Nor can I "make a cast" which to beware of more, the law which an orator2 of our time has laid down about this Lais, or my master's dictum about Plato.
This I can without rashness affirm: if that Phaedrus of yours ever really existed, if he was ever away from Socrates, Socrates never felt for Phaedrus a more passionate longing than I for the sight of you all these days: days do I say? months I mean . . . .3 unless he is straightway seized with love of you. Farewell, my greatest treasure beneath the sky, my glory. It is enough to have had such a master. My Lady mother sends you greeting.
Marcus Aurelius to Fronto
Probably from Naples 139 A.D.
To my master.