1News has just come that Silius Italicus has ended his life by starvation at his villa near Naples. 2The cause of his death was ill health. 2An incurable tumour had grown on him, and weary of it he hastened to death with unshakeable resolve, blessed and fortunate up to his last day, except that he lost the younger of his two sons; but he left the elder and better one flourishing, and even of consular rank. 3He had damaged his reputation under Nero — he was believed to have acted as an informer of his own accord — but in his friendship with Vitellius he had conducted himself wisely and courteously, had brought back glory from his proconsulship of Asia, and had washed away the stain of his former activity by an honourable retirement.
4He was among the leading men of the state, without power and without envy: he was greeted and courted, and lying much on his couch in a room always crowded, not because of his fortune, he passed his days in most learned conversation, whenever he was free from writing. 5He wrote poems with more care than talent, and sometimes tested people's judgements by giving readings. 6Finally, as his years advised, he withdrew from the city and kept to Campania, and not even the arrival of the new emperor moved him from there: great praise to the Caesar under whom this was allowed, great praise to the man who dared to use this liberty.
8He was a lover of beautiful things, to the point of being reproached for buying too much. 8He owned several villas in the same districts, and when he fell in love with new ones he neglected the old. 8Everywhere there were many books, many statues, many portraits, which he not only possessed but even revered, Virgil's above all, whose birthday he celebrated more devoutly than his own, especially at Naples, where he used to visit his tomb as if it were a temple. 9In this tranquillity he passed his seventy-fifth year, with a body delicate rather than infirm; 9and just as he was the last to be made consul by Nero, so he was the last to die of all those whom Nero had made consuls.
10This too is remarkable: the last of Nero's consulars has died, and it was in his consulship that Nero perished. 10When I recall this, pity for human frailty comes over me. 11For what is so cut short, so brief, as the longest life of a man? 11Does it not seem to you that Nero was here only just now? 11and yet meanwhile, of those who held the consulship under him, not one now survives. 12Yet why do I wonder at this? 12Not long ago Lucius Piso, the father of that Piso who was murdered in Africa by Valerius Festus in a most heinous crime, used to say that he saw no one in the senate whom he himself, as consul, had asked for his opinion.
13Within such narrow bounds is the very lifespan of so great a multitude confined, that those royal tears seem to me to deserve not only pardon but even praise; 13for they say that Xerxes, when he had surveyed his immense army with his eyes, wept because so swift an end hung over so many thousands. 14But all the more let us extend this time, whatever it is, fleeting and perishable, if not by deeds — for the material for these lies in another's hand — then certainly by study, and since we are denied a long life, let us leave something by which to bear witness that we have lived.
15I know you do not need spurring: yet my affection for you calls me to urge you on even as you run, just as you do me. 15'Good is this strife' when friends sharpen one another by mutual encouragement to the love of immortality. 15Farewell.