Page:Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto volume 2 Haines 1920.djvu/135

 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

163 A.D.

To my Lord Antoninus Augustus.

I have seen your little chicks, and a more welcome sight I shall never in my life see, so like in features to you that nothing can be more like than the 119

