1Get a penny ready and hear a golden tale – or rather tales; 1for the new one has reminded me of earlier ones, and it does not matter which I begin with. 2Verania, the wife of Piso, lay seriously ill – I mean the Piso whom Galba adopted. 2Regulus came to her. 2First, the shamelessness of the man, to come to a sick woman when he had been the bitterest enemy of her husband and most hateful to her! 3Let that pass, if he had only come; 3but he even sat close to her bed and asked on what day, at what hour she had been born. 3When he heard, he composes his face, fixes his eyes, moves his lips, works his fingers, calculates.
3Nothing. 3When he had kept the poor woman long in suspense, he said: 'You are in a critical period, but you will come through. 4To make this clearer to you, I will consult a soothsayer whom I have often tested.' 5Without delay he makes a sacrifice and declares that the entrails agree with the indication of the stars. 5She, credulous as people are in danger, calls for her codicils and writes a legacy to Regulus. 5Soon she grows worse, and dying she cries out that he is a wicked, treacherous man, worse even than a perjurer, who had sworn falsely to her by his son's life. 6Regulus does this no less wickedly than often, calling down the anger of the gods, whom he himself deceives every day, on the head of his unhappy boy.
7Velleius Blaesus, the well-known rich ex-consul, was struggling with his last illness: he wanted to change his will. 7Regulus, who hoped for something from the new will because he had lately begun to court him, kept urging and begging the doctors to prolong the man's breath somehow or other. 8After the will was sealed, he changes his part, turns his address round, and says to the same doctors: 'How long will you torture the poor man? 8why do you begrudge a good death to one to whom you cannot give life?' 8Blaesus dies and, as though he had heard everything, leaves Regulus not even a trifle. 9Are two tales enough, or by the rule of the schools do you demand a third?
9there is material for one. 10Aurelia, a woman of distinction, about to seal her will, had put on her most beautiful tunics. 10When Regulus had come to witness the sealing, he said: 'I ask you to leave these to me.' 11Aurelia thought the man was joking, but he pressed in earnest; 11in short, he forced the woman to open the will and to leave him the tunics she had on; 11he watched her writing, and looked to see whether she had written it. 11And Aurelia indeed is alive, yet he forced this on her as though she were about to die. 11And this man takes inheritances, takes legacies, as if he deserved them.
12But why do I exert myself in a state in which wickedness and dishonesty have long had rewards no smaller, indeed greater, than modesty and virtue? 13Look at Regulus, who from being poor and humble has advanced through his crimes to such wealth that he told me himself, when he was consulting the omens on how soon he would make up sixty million sesterces, that he had found double entrails, by which it was portended that he would have a hundred and twenty million. 14And he will have it, if only, as he has begun, he goes on dictating other people's wills to the very people whose wills they are, which is the most wicked kind of fraud.
14Farewell.