1I often tell you that Regulus has force. 1It is amazing how he accomplishes whatever he has set his mind to. 1He decided to mourn his son: he mourns as no one else does. 1He decided to have as many statues and portraits of him made as possible: he is about this in every workshop, he has him represented in paint, in wax, in bronze, in silver, in gold, ivory and marble. 2He himself recently gathered an enormous audience and read aloud a book about his life; 2about the life of a boy, yet he read it all the same. 2He had the same book copied out in a thousand copies and sent it all over Italy and the provinces.
2He wrote officially asking that the town councillors should choose whoever among them had the best voice to read it to the people: it was done. 3If he had turned this force — or whatever other name should be given to a determination to obtain whatever you want — to better ends, how much good he could have done! 3And yet there is less force in the good than in the bad, and just as 'ignorance brings boldness, but reflection hesitation', so modesty weakens upright characters and audacity strengthens perverse ones. 4Regulus is an example. 4Weak lungs, a confused delivery, a stammering tongue, the slowest invention, no memory, nothing in short but a mad temperament, and yet by impudence and that very madness he has got so far as to be regarded as an orator.
5So Herennius Senecio wonderfully turned Cato's famous saying about the orator round against him: 'An orator is a bad man unskilled in speaking.' 5Cato himself, I swear, did not portray the true orator as well as Senecio portrayed Regulus. 6Have you anything with which to repay such a letter in kind? 6You have, if you write and tell me whether any of my friends in your town, or even you yourself, has read this mournful book of Regulus' in the forum like a street-performer, 'raising', no doubt, as Demosthenes says, 'his voice, exulting and bawling at the top of his throat'. 7For it is so absurd that it could draw laughter rather than groans: you would think it written not about a boy but by one.
7Farewell.