1Regulus has lost his son, the one misfortune he did not deserve, because I am not sure he thinks it a misfortune. 1The boy had a keen but uncertain character, yet one that might still have followed the right path, if he had not taken after his father. 2Regulus freed him from his paternal power so that he might become his mother's heir; 2and once the boy was 'made over to him' — so people commonly put it, judging by the man's character — he courted him for his legacy with a pretence of indulgence that was foul and unheard-of in a parent. 2Incredible, but think of Regulus. 3Yet now that he has lost him he mourns like a madman.
3The boy had many ponies, both in harness and unbroken, he had dogs large and small, he had nightingales, parrots, blackbirds: Regulus slaughtered them all around the pyre. 4Nor was that grief, but a display of grief. 4People flock to him in astonishing numbers. 4All loathe and hate him, and yet, as if they approved of him, as if they loved him, they run to him and crowd round him, and, to put what I feel in a word, in winning the favour of Regulus they imitate Regulus. 5He keeps himself across the Tiber in his gardens, where he has covered a vast stretch of ground with immense colonnades and the riverbank with statues of himself, for he is lavish amid the greatest avarice and vainglorious amid the greatest infamy.
6So he is harassing the whole city at the unhealthiest season of the year, and thinks the harassing a consolation. 6He says he wants to take a wife, doing this too, like everything else, perversely. 7You will soon hear of the wedding of a mourner, the wedding of an old man; 7of which the one is too early, the other too late. 7You ask how I divine this? 8Not because he says so himself, for nothing is more untruthful than he, but because it is certain that Regulus will do whatever ought not to be done. 8Farewell.