1All singers have this fault: among friends, when asked to sing, they can never bring themselves to do it; unasked, they never stop. 3That Sardinian Tigellius had this fault. 4Caesar, who could have compelled him, if he asked him by his father's friendship and his own, would get nowhere; 6if the fancy took him, he would sing 'Io Bacche' from the egg to the apples, now at the top of his voice, now in the note that sounds lowest on the four strings. 9There was nothing consistent in the man: often he would run like one fleeing an enemy, very often walk like one carrying the sacred things of Juno; 11he would often have two hundred slaves, often ten; 12now talking of kings and tetrarchs, everything grand, now: 'Let me have a three-legged table and a shell of clean salt and a toga, however coarse, that can keep out the cold.' Had you given a million sesterces to this thrifty man, content with little, in five days there was nothing in his purse; 17he would stay awake at night right through to morning, and snore all day; 18never was anything so unlike itself.
19Now someone may say to me, 'What about you? 20Have you no faults?' Yes, but others, and perhaps smaller ones. 21When Maenius was carping at Novius behind his back, 'Hey you,' someone said, 'do you not know yourself, or do you think you can fool us as though we did not know you?' 'I forgive myself,' said Maenius. 24This is a foolish and shameless self-love, and deserves to be branded. 25When you look over your own faults with bleary, ointment-smeared eyes, why are you as sharp-sighted in the faults of your friends as an eagle or the Epidaurian serpent? 27But the result for you is that they in turn inquire into your faults.
29He is a little too quick-tempered, not well suited to the keen noses of these people; 30he might be laughed at because, with his countrified haircut, his toga hangs awkwardly and his loose shoe barely clings to his foot: but he is a good man, so that there is no better, but he is your friend, but a great talent lies hidden beneath this uncultivated body. 34Finally, shake yourself out, to see whether nature has ever sown any faults in you, or even bad habit; 36for in neglected fields there springs up fern fit for burning. 38Let us turn first to this, that a lover, blind, does not see his mistress's ugly faults, or is even delighted by them, as Balbinus is by Hagna's polyp.
41I could wish that we erred in this way in friendship, and that virtue had given such an error an honourable name. 43And as a father with his son's, so we ought not to be disgusted by a friend's fault, if he has any. 44A father calls his cross-eyed son 'Blinky', and if anyone's son is badly undersized, 'Chick', as the dwarf Sisyphus once was; 47this one with twisted legs he lisps 'Bandy', that one, badly propped on misshapen ankles, 'Clubfoot'. 49This one lives rather sparingly: let him be called thrifty; 49this one is tactless and a bit of a show-off: he asks his friends to think him sociable; 51but another is rather rough and more outspoken than is fair: let him be thought candid and brave; 53he is hot-headed: let him be counted among the spirited.
53In my opinion, it is this that both makes friends and keeps them friends. 55But we turn the virtues themselves upside down, and are mad to dirty a clean jar. 56Some honest man lives among us, a very modest fellow: we give him the nickname of slow and dull. 58Another flees every snare and offers his exposed side to no villain, since we pass our lives among a set where keen envy and accusations flourish: instead of sensible and not unwary, we call him insincere and crafty. 63If someone is rather simple, as I would often gladly have shown myself to you, Maecenas, so as to interrupt you perhaps while you read or sat silent with some chatter or other: 'A nuisance; he plainly lacks common sense,' we say.
66Alas, how rashly we enact an unfair law against ourselves! 68For no one is born without faults; 68the best is he who is burdened by the smallest. 69A kind friend, as is fair, when he weighs my good qualities against my faults, should incline towards the former as being more numerous, if only my good qualities are more numerous, if he wishes to be loved: on this condition he will be put in the same scales. 73He who asks that his friend should not take offence at his own boils will forgive the other's warts: it is fair that one who seeks pardon for his offences should grant it in return.
76In short, since the fault of anger, and likewise the others that cling to fools, cannot be cut out completely, why does reason not use its own weights and measures, and restrain offences with punishments according to what each thing is? 80If someone were to nail to the cross a slave who, told to take away the dish, had licked up the half-eaten fish and the lukewarm sauce, he would be called madder than Labeo among sane men. 83How much madder and greater a fault is this: a friend has committed some small offence, and if you did not overlook it you would be thought ungracious: you hate him bitterly and avoid him, as a debtor avoids Druso, who, unless when the grim Kalends have come round the poor man scrapes up the interest or the principal from somewhere or other, has to listen like a prisoner, with neck stretched out, to his bitter histories.
90When drunk he has wet the couch, or knocked off the table a bowl worn by the hands of Evander: for this reason, or because when hungry he took a chicken placed before him on my side of the dish, is he to be a less pleasant friend to me? 94What shall I do if he commits a theft, or betrays what was entrusted to his good faith, or denies his pledge? 96Those who have decided that all offences are roughly equal are in difficulties when it comes to the truth: feelings and customs fight against them, and expediency itself, almost the mother of the just and the fair. 99When living creatures crept forth upon the newborn earth, a dumb and ugly herd, they fought for acorns and lairs with nails and fists, then with clubs, and so on with weapons, which experience later had forged, until they found words and names by which to mark their sounds and feelings; 104after that they began to refrain from war, to fortify towns and to lay down laws, that no one should be a thief or a robber or an adulterer.
107For before Helen a cunt was the foulest cause of war, but those men perished by deaths unknown to history whom, as they snatched at random love in the manner of wild beasts, one stronger than the rest would slaughter, like a bull in the herd. 111You must admit that laws were invented from fear of injustice, if you are willing to unroll the ages and annals of the world. 113Nor can Nature separate the unjust from the just as she divides good things from their opposites, what is to be avoided from what is to be sought; nor will reason prove this, that a man who has broken the tender cabbages in another's garden sins just as much and in the same way as one who has stolen by night the sacred things of the gods.
117Let there be a rule to impose fair penalties on offences, so that you do not lash with the horrible scourge one who deserves the strap. 120For that you will beat with the cane one who deserves to undergo heavier lashes I do not fear, when you say that thefts are on a par with highway robbery, and threaten to cut back small and great with the same sickle, if men were to give you kingship. 124If the wise man is rich and a good cobbler and alone handsome and a king, why do you wish for what you have? 126'You do not know what father Chrysippus says,' he says: 'the wise man has never made himself boots or sandals; 128yet the wise man is a cobbler.' How so?
129'Just as Hermogenes, though silent, is nonetheless a singer and the best of musicians; 130as shrewd Alfenus, after throwing away every tool of his trade and shutting up his shop, was still a cobbler: so the wise man is the best craftsman of every craft, so he alone is a king.' Cheeky boys pluck your beard, and unless you keep them off with a stick, you are jostled by the crowd standing round you, and, poor wretch, you burst and bark, greatest of mighty kings. 137Not to make a long story of it: while you, a king, go off to bathe for a farthing, and no bodyguard escorts you, you fool, except Crispinus, my dear friends will forgive me if, fool that I am, I do some wrong, and I in turn shall gladly bear with their lapses, and as a private citizen I shall live more happily than you, a king.