Translation:Letters to Friends/9.26

To L. Papirius Paetus at Naples

Rome, November 46 BC

Cicero says hello to Paetus

I had been reclining at the ninth hour when I wrote a copy of this to you on tablets. You will say, 'Where?' At Volumnius Eutrapelus', and above me is Atticus, below Verrius, friends of yours. You're surprised our slavery has become so cheerful? So, what should I do? I ask your advice, you who listen to a philosopher. Should I be tormented, torture myself? What should I pursue? Then, for how long? 'Live,' you say, 'in your books.' Do you believe I'm doing anything else, or can live if I didn't live in my books? But of these there's not even an abundance, but a certain limit; when I departed from these people, although I've the least interest in dinner, one 'problem' which you proposed to the philosopher Dio, still I do not find what better to do before I take myself to sleep.

Hear the rest. Cytheris reclined below Eutrapelus. 'So, was the famous Cicero,' you say, 'at this banquet, "whom they watched attentively, toward whose face Greeks turned their own faces"?' By Hercules, I did not suspect she would there. But nevertheless, not even that famous Socratic Aristippus blushed when it had been offered for him to have Lais. 'I hold,' he said, 'I am not held by, Lais' (this is better in Greek; you will translate if you wish). But nothing of those things ever excited me, not even as a young man, much less now as an old one. I'm delighted by a banquet; there I say what comes into the sole, as it's said, and turn a sigh into the biggest laughs. Do you do this better, you who even mocked a philosopher, when he had said whether anyone sought anything, you said you sought dinner in the morning? That moron thought you would ask whether there was one sky or countless. What's this to you? But by Hercules, what's a dinner at all to you, especially there?

Accordingly, my life is so. Every day something is being read or written. Then, lest I bestow nothing upon my friends, I feast with them not only not against the law, if there's any law now, but even within the law, and by a considerable amount. Therefore, there is no reason for you to dread my arrival. You will receive a guest of much jest, not of much food.