1I write this to you in great sadness, our friend Fundanus' younger daughter having died. 1I have never seen anything more charming or lovable than that girl, or more worthy not only of a longer life but almost of immortality. 2She had not yet reached the age of fourteen, and already she had the good sense of an old woman, the dignity of a matron, and yet a girl's sweetness together with a maiden's modesty. 3How she used to cling to her father's neck! 3how lovingly and modestly she would embrace us, her father's friends! 3how she loved her nurses, her attendants, her teachers, each according to their service! 3how eagerly, how intelligently she used to read!
3how sparingly and carefully she played! 3With what self-control, what patience, and even what firmness she bore her last illness! 4She obeyed the doctors, encouraged her sister and her father, and, when the strength of her body had failed her, kept herself going by the vigour of her spirit. 5This lasted in her right to the end, and was broken neither by the length of her illness nor by the fear of death, so as to leave us more and heavier reasons for both longing and grief. 6O truly sad and bitter death! 6o time of death more cruel than death itself! 6she was already engaged to an excellent young man, the wedding day already chosen, we already invited.
6Into what grief has that joy been turned! 7I cannot express in words how deep a wound I felt in my heart when I heard Fundanus himself — for grief invents many sorrowful things — giving instructions that what he had been going to spend on clothes, pearls and jewels should be spent on incense, ointments and perfumes. 8He is, indeed, a learned and wise man, as one who has devoted himself from his earliest years to deeper studies and arts; 8but now he scorns everything he has often heard and often said, and, all his other virtues driven out, he is wholly given over to his love as a father.
9You will forgive him, and even praise him, if you think what he has lost. 9For he has lost a daughter who resembled him no less in character than in face and expression, and had copied her whole father with a wonderful likeness. 10So if you send him any letter about a grief so just, remember to offer comfort that is not as it were reproving and too forceful, but gentle and kind. 10An interval of time will do much to make him accept it more readily. 11For just as a wound that is still raw shrinks from the hands of those treating it, then endures them and even seeks them out, so a fresh grief of the mind rejects and shuns consolations, but soon longs for them and finds rest in them when they are gently applied.
11Farewell.