Page:Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto volume 1 Haines 1919.djvu/91

 to court them but those who approach them under the madness and duress of love; but you, such is your beauty, cannot reap any greater advantage from a lover. For non-lovers have need of you no less than they. And indeed, to those who are really beautiful, lovers are as useless as flatterers to those who deserve praise. It is sailors and steersmen and captains of warships and merchants, and those that in other ways travel upon it, who give excellence and glory and honour and gain and ornament to the sea—not, heaven help us, dolphins that can live only in the sea: but for beautiful boys it is we who cherish and praise them disinterestedly, not lovers, whose life, deprived of their darlings, would be unlivable. And you will find, if you look into it, that lovers are the cause of the utmost disgrace. But all who are right-minded must shun disgrace, the young most of all, since the evil attaching to them at the beginning of a long life will rest upon them the longer.

7. As, then, in the case of sacred rites and sacrifices, so also of life, it behoves above all those who are entering upon them to have a care for their good name      For indeed by such adornments lovers do them no honour, but are themselves guilty of affectation and display, and, as it were, vulgarize the mysteries of love. Your lover, too, as they say, composes some amatory writings about you in the hope of enticing you with this bait, if with no other, and attracting you to himself and 27

