Page:The Letters of Cicero Shuckburg III.pdf/134

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if I ever get myself sufficiently free to be able to come to your parts, I won't let you think that you haven't sufficient notice from me.

CCCCLXXVII (F IX, 26)

TO L. PAPIRIUS PÆTUS (AT NAPLES)

(?)

I have just lain down to dinner at three o'clock, when I scribble a copy of this note to you in my pocket-book. You will say, "where?" With Volumnius Eutrapelus. One place above me is Atticus, one below Verrius, both friends of yours. Do you wonder that our slavery is made so gay? Well, what am I to do? I ask your advice as the pupil of a philosopher. Am I to be miserable, to torment myself? What should I get by that? And, moreover, how long? "Live with your books," say you. Well, do you suppose that I do anything else? Or could I have kept alive, had I not lived with my books? But even to them there is, I don't say a surfeit, but a certain limit. When I have left them, though I care very little about my dinner—the one problem which you put before the philosopher Dion—still, what better to do with my time before taking myself off to bed I cannot discover.

Now listen to the rest. Below Eutrapelus lay Cytheris. At such a party as that, say you, was the famous Cicero,

"To whom all looked with rev'rence, on whose face Greeks turned their eyes with wonder?"

To tell you the truth, I had no suspicion that she would be