A s to the simile, which you say you are puzzling over and for which you call me in as your ally and adjutant in finding the clue, you will not take it amiss, will you, if I look for the clue to that fancy within your breast and your father's1 breast? Just as the island lies in the Ionian or Tyrrhenian sea, or, maybe, rather in the Adriatic, or, if it be some other sea, give it its right name—as then that sea-girt island (Aenaria) itself receives and repels the ocean waves, and itself bears the whole brunt of attack from fleets, pirates, sea-monsters and storms, yet in a lake within protects another island safely from all dangers and difficulties, while that other nevertheless shares in all its delights and pleasures (for that island in the inland lake is, like the other, washed by the waters, like it catches the health-giving breezes, like it is inhabited, like it looks out on the sea), so your father bears on his own shoulders the troubles and difficulties of the Roman empire while you he safeguards safely in his own tranquil breast, the partner in his rank and glory and in all that is his. Accordingly you can use this simile in a variety of ways, when you return thanks to your father,2 on which occasion you should be most full and copious. For there is nothing that you can say in all your life with more honour or more truth or more liking than that which concerns the setting forth of your father's praises.3 Whatever simile I may subsequently suggest will not please you so much as this one which concerns your father. I know this as well as you feel it. Consequently I will not myself give you any other simile, but will shew you the method of finding them out for yourself. You must send me any similes you search out and find by the method shewn you for that purpose, that if they prove neat and skilful I may rejoice and love you.
Now, in the first place, you are aware that a simile is used for the purpose of setting off a thing or discrediting it, or comparing, or depreciating, or amplifying it, or of making credible what is scarcely credible. Where nothing of the kind is required, there will be no room for a simile. Hereafter when you compose a simile for a subject in hand, just as, if you were a painter, you would notice the characteristics of the object you were painting, so must ) T ou do in writing. Now, the characteristics of a thing you will pick out from many points of view, the likenesses of kind, the likenesses of form, the whole, the parts, the individual traits, the differences, the contraries, the consequences and the resultants, the names, the accidents, the elements, and generally everything from which arguments are drawn, the point in fact so often dwelt upon when we were dealing with the commonplaces of the arguments of Theodorus.4 If any of them have slipped your memory, it will not be amiss for us to go over them afresh when time serves. In this simile, which I have sketched out about your father and you, I have taken one of the accidentals of the subject, the identity of the safety and the enjoyment. Now it remains for you, by those ways and paths which I have pointed out above, to discover how you may most conveniently come at your Aenaria.
The pain in my elbow is not much better. Farewell, my Lord, with your rare abilities. Give my greeting to my Lady your mother. On another occasion we will follow out,5 with more care and exactness, the whole art of simile-making; now I have only touched upon the heads of it.