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intimacy, the same tastes—what bond is lacking, I ask you, to make our union complete? Can we not then be together? For the life of me I cannot see what is to prevent it. But as a matter of fact we have not been so, though we were neighbours in the country at Tusculum and Puteoli; I need not say in Rome, where the forum is a meeting-place for all, so that propinquity of residence is of no account.

³ But by some evil chance or other our age is confronted with conditions which, at the very moment when I ought to have been more than ever prosperous, make me actually ashamed of being alive. What possible sanctuary is left to me, despoiled as I am of all that might have graced and comforted both my private and public life? Literary work, I presume; and indeed it is that which I find an unfailing resource; for what else is there for me to do? But even literature itself seems somehow or other to shut me out of any haven of refuge, and to cast it in my teeth that I cleave to a life which promises nothing but the prolongation of a period of utter misery.

⁴ Such being the situation, can you wonder at my absenting myself from a city where I can find no pleasure in my home, and where I utterly loathe the life one leads, the men one meets, the bar and the senate-house? Accordingly I resort to literary work on which I spend all my time—not to get out of it a lasting cure, but some little forgetfulness of my sorrow.

⁵ But had you and I done what, owing to our daily apprehension, it never so much as occurred to us to do, we should have been together all the time, and I should have found your ill-health^[1] no more of an objection than you would my melancholy brooding.