1I am glad you have arrived safely in the city; 1and you have come, now more than ever before, very much missed by me. 1I myself shall stay a few more days at my Tusculan villa, to finish the little work I have in hand. 2For I fear that, if I relax this concentration now, at the end, I shall find it hard to take it up again. 2Meanwhile, so that my haste may lose nothing, what I am going to ask of you in person I ask in this letter, sent ahead as a kind of forerunner. 2But first hear the reasons for my request, and then what I am asking.
3When I was recently in my home town, the son of a fellow townsman, still wearing the boy's toga, came to pay his respects to me. 3And I to him: 'Are you studying?' 3I said. 3He answered: 'Yes.' 3'Where?' 3'At Milan.' 3'Why not here?' 3And his father — for he was with him, and had in fact brought the boy himself — said: 'Because we have no teachers here.' 4'Why none? 4For it would be very much in your interest, you who are fathers' — and, conveniently, several fathers were listening — 'that your children should study here above all. 4For where could they stay more pleasantly than in their home town, or be kept more decently than under their parents' eyes, or at less expense than at home?
5How small a matter is it, then, to put money together and hire teachers, and to add to their salaries what you now spend on lodgings, on travel, on the things that are bought away from home — and everything is bought away from home? 5Indeed I, who have no children yet, am ready, on behalf of our community, as if for a daughter or a parent, to give a third of whatever you decide to contribute. 6I would even promise the whole, were I not afraid that this gift of mine might some day be corrupted by favour-seeking, as I see happen in many places where teachers are hired at public expense.
7This fault can be met by one remedy: if the right of hiring is left to the parents alone, and the obligation to contribute adds to them a scruple about choosing rightly. 8For those who might perhaps be careless with another's money will certainly be careful with their own, and will take pains that no one unworthy receives money from me, if he is also to receive it from them. 9So agree, act together, and take greater spirit from mine; for I want what I shall have to contribute to be as large as possible. 9You can give nothing more honourable to your children, nothing more welcome to your home town.
9Let those who are born here be brought up here, and from earliest childhood grow used to loving and frequenting their native soil. 9And I only wish you may bring in teachers so famous that the neighbouring towns come here for their education, and that, as your children now flock to other places, so others' children may soon flock to this place!' 10I thought I should go back over this at some length, and as if from the source, so that you might know better how welcome it would be to me if you undertook what I am charging you with. 10I charge you, and, in view of the importance of the matter, I ask you, to look about among the crowd of students who gather round you out of admiration for your talent for teachers whom we might approach, but on this condition, that I bind myself by a promise to no one.
10For I leave everything free for the parents: let them judge, let them choose; I claim for myself only the care and the expense. 11So if anyone is found who trusts in his own talent, let him go there on the understanding that he takes nothing certain from here except his own self-confidence. 11Farewell.