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LXXXI. In the course of his life he suffered from several severe and dangerous
illnesses, especially after the subjugation of Cantabria [23 B.C.], when he was in such a
desperate plight from abscesses of the liver, that he was forced to submit to an
unprecedented and hazardous course of treatment. Since hot fomentations gave him no
relief, he was led by the advice of his physician Antonius Musa to try cold ones. He
experienced also some disorders which recurred every year at definite times; for he was
commonly ailing just before his birthday; and at the beginning of spring he was troubled
with an enlargement of the diaphragm, and when the wind was in the south, with catarrh.
Hence his constitution was so weakened that he could not readily endure either cold or
heat.
LXXXII. In winter he protected himself with four tunics and a heavy toga, besides an
undershirt, a woollen chest-protector, and wraps for his thighs and shins, while in summer
he slept with the doors of his bed-room open, oftentimes in the open court near a
fountain, besides having someone to fan him. Yet he could not endure the sun even in
winter, and never walked in the open air without wearing a broad-brimmed hat, even at
home. He travelled in a litter, usually at night, and by such slow and easy stages that he
took two days to go to Praeneste or Tibur; and if he could reach his destination by sea,
he preferred to sail. Yet in spite of all he made good his weakness by great care,
especially by moderation in bathing; for as a rule he was anointed or took a sweat by a
fire, after which he was doused with water either lukewarm or tepid from long exposure to
the sun. When however he had to use hot salt water and sulphur baths for rheumatism, he
contented himself with sitting on a wooden bath-seat, which he called by the Spanish name dureta,
and plunging his hands and feet in the water one after the other.
LXXXIII. Immediately after the civil war he gave up exercise with horses and arms in
the Campus Martius, at first turning to pass-ball [the pila was a small hard ball;
three players stood at the three points of a triangle (whence the game was called trigon)
and passed the ball one from the other] and balloonball [the folliculus was a large
light ball; the players wore a guard on the right arm, with which they struck the ball, as
in the Italian gioco del pallone], but soon confining himself to riding or taking a
walk, ending the latter by running and leaping, trapped in a mantle or a blanket. To
divert his mind he sometimes angled and sometimes played at dice, marbles and nuts [many
games were played with nuts] with little boys, searching everywhere for such as were
attractive for their pretty faces or their prattle, especially Syrians and Moors; for he
abhorred dwarfs, cripples, and everything of that sort, as freaks of nature and of ill
omen.
LXXXIV. From early youth he devoted himself eagerly and with the utmost diligence to
oratory and liberal studies. During the war at Mutina, amid such a press of affairs, he is
said to have read, written and declaimed every day. In fact he never afterwards spoke in
the Senate, or to the people or the soldiers, except in a studied and written address,
although he did not lack the gift of speaking offhand without preparation. Moreover, to
avoid the danger of forgetting what he was to say, or wasting time in committing it to
memory, he adopted the practice of reading everything from a manuscript. Even his
conversations with individuals and the more important of those with his own wife Livia, he
always wrote out and read from a note-book, for fear of saying too much or too little if
he spoke offhand. He had an agreeable and rather characteristic enunciation, and he
practised constantly with a teacher of elocution; but sometimes because of weakness of the
throat he addressed the people through a herald.
LXXXV. He wrote numerous works of various kinds in prose, some of which he read to a
group of his intimate friends, as others did in a lecture room; for example, his
"Reply to Brutus on Cato." At the reading of these volumes he had all but come
to the end, when he grew tired and handed them to Tiberius to finish, for he was well on
in years. He also wrote "Exhortations to Philosophy" and some volumes of an
Autobiography, giving an account of his life in thirteen books up to the time of the
Cantabrian war, but no farther. His essays in poetry were but slight. One book has come
down to us written in hexameter verse, of which the subject and the title is
"Sicily." There is another, equally brief, of "Epigrams," which he
composed for the most part at the time of the bath. Though he began a tragedy with much
enthusiasm, he destroyed it because his style did not satisfy him, and when some of his
friends asked him what in the world had become of Ajax, he answered that "his Ajax
had fallen on his sponge."
LXXXVI. He cultivated a style of speaking that was chaste and elegant, avoiding the
vanity of attempts at epigram and an artificial order, and as he himself expresses it,
"the noisomeness of far-fetched words," making it his chief aim to express his
thought as clearly as possible. With this end in view, to avoid confusing and checking his
reader or hearer at any point, he did not hesitate to use prepositions with names of
cities, nor to repeat conjunctions several times, the omission of which causes some
obscurity, though it adds grace. He looked on innovators and archaizers with equal
contempt, as faulty in opposite directions, and he sometimes had a fling at them, in
particular his friend Maecenas, whose "unguent-dripping curls," as he calls
them, he loses no opportunity of belabouring and pokes fun at them by parody. He did not
spare even Tiberius, who sometimes hunted up obsolete and pedantic expressions; and as for
Marcus Antonius, he calls him a madman, for writing rather to be admired than to be
understood. Then going on to ridicule his perverse and inconsistent taste in choosing an
oratorical style, he adds the following: "Can you doubt whether you ought to imitate
Annius Cimber or Veranius Flaccus, that you use the words which Sallustius Crispus gleaned
from Cato's Origines ? Or would you rather introduce into our tongue the verbose and
unmeaning fluency of the Asiatic orators?" And in a letter praising the talent of his
granddaughter Agrippina he writes: "But you must take great care not to write and
talk affectedly."
LXXXVII. That in his everyday conversation he used certain favourite and peculiar
expressions appears from letters in his own hand, in which he says every now and then,
when he wishes to indicate that certain men will never pay, that "they will pay on
the Greek Kalends." Urging his correspondent to put up with present circumstances,
such as they are, he says: "Let's be satisfied with the Cato we have; and to express
the speed of a hasty action, "Quicker than you can cook asparagus." He
continually used baceolus (dolt) for stultus (fool), for pullus
(dark) pulleiaceus (darkish), and for cerritus (mad) vacerrosus
(blockhead); also vapide se habere (feel flat) for male se habere (feel
badly), and betizaree (be like a beet) for languere (be weak), for which the
vulgar term is lachanizare. Besides he used simus for sumus and domos
in the genitive singular instead of domuos. The last two forms he wrote invariably,
for fear they should be thought errors rather than a habit. I have also observed this
special peculiarity in his manner of writing: he does not divide words or carry
superfluous letters from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, but writes them
just below the rest of the word and draws a loop around them.
LXXXVIII. He does not strictly comply with orthography, that is to say the theoretical
rules of spelling laid down by the grammarians, seeming to be rather of the mind of those
who believe that we should spell exactly as we pronounce. Of course his frequent
transposition or omission of syllables as well as of letters are slips common to all
mankind. I should not have noted this, did it not seem to me surprising that some have
written that he cashiered a consular governor, as an uncultivated and ignorant fellow,
because he observed that he had written izi for ipsi. Whenever he wrote in
cipher, he wrote B for A, C for B, and the rest of the letters on the same principle,
using AA for X.
LXXXIX. He was equally interested in Greek studies, and in these too he excelled
greatly. His teacher of declamation was Apollodorus of Pergamon, whom he even took with
him in his youthful days from Rome to Apollonia, though Apollodorus was an old man at the
time. Later he became versed in various forms of learning through association with the
philosopher Areus and his sons Dionysius and Nicanor. Yet he never acquired the ability to
speak Greek fluently or to compose anything in it; for if he had occasion to use the
language, he wrote what he had to say in Latin and gave it to someone else to translate.
Still he was far from being ignorant of Greek poetry, even taking great pleasure in the
Old Comedy and frequently staging it at his public entertainments. In reading the writers
of both tongues there was nothing for which he looked so carefully as precepts and
examples instructive to the public or to individuals; these he would often copy word for
word, and send to the members of his household, or to his generals and provincial
governors, whenever any of them required admonition. He even read entire volumes to the
Senate and called the attention of the people to them by proclamations; for example, the
speeches of Quintus Metellus "On Increasing the Family," and of Rutilius
"On the Height of Buildings"; to convince them that he was not the first to give
attention to such matters, but ihat they had aroused the interest even of their
forefathers. He gave every encouragement to the men of talent of his own age, listening
with courtesy and patience to their readings, not only of poetry and history, but of
speeches and dialogues as well. But he took offence at being made the subject of any
composition except in serious earnest and by the most eminent writers, often charging the
praetors not to let his name be cheapened in prize declamations.
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