1Have you heard that Valerius Licinianus is teaching in Sicily? 1I think you have not heard yet: for the news is recent. 1This man of praetorian rank was not long ago counted among the most eloquent pleaders of cases; 1now he has fallen so far as to become an exile instead of a senator, a rhetorician instead of an orator. 2So he himself said in his preface, sadly and solemnly: 'What games you play, Fortune! 2for you make professors out of senators, and senators out of professors.' 2There is so much bile, so much bitterness in this remark that he seems to me to have become a professor just in order to say it.
3Likewise, when he had come in wrapped in a Greek cloak — for those who have been forbidden fire and water lose the right to the toga — after he had composed himself and looked over his attire, he said: 'I am going to declaim in Latin.' 4You will say this is sad and pitiable, but that he deserved it, having stained these very studies with the crime of incest. 5He did indeed confess to incest, but it is uncertain whether he did so because it was true, or because he feared something worse if he denied it. 5For Domitian was raging and seething, left isolated amid enormous hatred. 6For when he had longed to bury alive Cornelia, the chief Vestal, thinking that his age would be made illustrious by examples of this kind, he used his right as Pontifex Maximus, or rather the savagery of a tyrant and the licence of a despot, to summon the other pontiffs not to the Regia but to his Alban villa.
6And with no less a crime than the one he seemed to be punishing, he condemned her of incest in her absence and unheard, though he himself had not only defiled his brother's daughter by incest but had even killed her; 6for she died, a widow, from an abortion. 7Pontiffs were sent at once to see to her burial and death. 7She, stretching out her hands now to Vesta, now to the other gods, cried out many things, but this most often: 'Caesar thinks me unchaste, when it was while I was performing the rites that he conquered and triumphed!' 8Whether she said this flattering or mocking him, out of confidence in herself or out of contempt for the emperor, is uncertain.
8She kept saying it until she was led to her punishment, whether innocent I do not know, but certainly as one innocent. 9Moreover, when she was being let down into that underground chamber and her stola caught as she descended, she turned and gathered it up, and when the executioner offered her his hand, she turned away and shrank back, and with a last act of sanctity rejected the foul contact as if from a body wholly chaste and pure; and with every observance of modesty 'she took great care to fall becomingly'. 10Besides, Celer, a Roman knight, who was charged with being Cornelia's lover, while he was being beaten with rods in the Comitium, had kept repeating this cry: 'What have I done?
10I have done nothing.' 11So Domitian was burning with the infamy of both cruelty and injustice. 11He seizes on Licinianus, for having hidden a freedwoman of Cornelia's on his estate. 11Licinianus is warned in advance by those who were concerned for him that, if he did not want to suffer the Comitium and the rods, he should take refuge in confession, as if in pardon. 11He did so. 12Herennius Senecio spoke on behalf of the absent man something like that famous line: 'Patroclus lies dead.' 12For he said: 'From advocate I have become messenger; 12Licinianus has withdrawn.' 13This pleased Domitian so much that he betrayed himself by his delight, and said: 'Licinianus has acquitted us.' 13He added too that his sense of shame should not be pressed; 13and he allowed him to snatch whatever he could from his property before his goods were confiscated, and gave him a mild exile as if by way of reward.
14From there, however, he was later moved by the clemency of the deified Nerva to Sicily, where he now teaches and takes his revenge on fortune in his prefaces. 15You see how obediently I comply with your wishes, writing not only of affairs in the city but even of those abroad so diligently that I go back a long way. 15And indeed I supposed that, because you were away at the time, you had heard nothing else about Licinianus than that he had been banished for incest. 15For rumour reports the sum of events, not their order. 16I deserve that you in return should write out in full what is happening in your town and in the neighbouring ones — for some notable things usually occur — and in short send me whatever news you like, provided it comes in a letter no less long.
16I shall count not just the pages but even the lines and syllables. 16Farewell.