text=F:book=15:letter=18
I think this letter must belong to the early part of B.C. 45, not to December, B.C. 46, as Messrs. Tyrrell and Purser and Mueller place it. Caesar only left Rome for Spain on the 2nd of December, and Cicero could hardly have been expecting news so soon. Moreover, Cassius—who declined to accompany Caesar to Spain—seems to have gone on his tour in the early part of B.C. 45, and to be staying at Brundisium. MY letter would have been longer, had not the messenger come for it when he was just on the point of starting for you. It would have been longer also if it had any persiflage in it, for we cannot be serious with safety. "Can we laugh, then?" you will say. No, by Hercules, not very easily. Yet other means of distraction from our troubles we have none. "Where, then," you will say, "is your philosophy?" Yours indeed is in the kitchen, mine in the schools. Reading, in palaestra est. Mueller, however, retains the MS. reading, molesta est, "only gives me annoyance," as though it reminded him of what he should, without enabling him to do it—video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. For I am ashamed of being a slave. Accordingly, I pose as being busy about other things, to avoid the reproach of Plato. Who said that men ought to "be free and fear slavery worse than death," Rep. 387B. To be "busy about other things" or "about something else " is a kind of proverbial way of saying that one is not attending to serious business. We have no Certain intelligence from Spain as yet—in fact, no news at all. For my sake I am sorry that you are out of town, for your own I am glad. But your letter-carrier is getting clamorous. Good-bye then, and love me as you have done from boyhood.