1I have been told that Gaius Fannius has died; 1the news overwhelmed me with deep grief, first because I loved this refined and eloquent man, and secondly because I used to rely on his judgement. 1For he was sharp by nature, trained by practice, and very ready with the truth. 2Besides this, what happened to him personally distresses me: he died under an old will, leaving out those he most loved and favouring those with whom he was more at odds. 2But this is somehow bearable; 2what is worse is that he left a very fine work unfinished. 3For although he was distracted by pleading cases, he was nevertheless writing about the deaths of those who were killed or banished by Nero, and had already completed three books, subtle, careful and in good Latin, midway between conversation and history, and he was all the more eager to finish the rest the more often these were read.
4To me, however, the death of those who are preparing something immortal always seems bitter and untimely. 4For those who are given over to pleasures and live, as it were, from day to day, end their reasons for living each day; 4but those who think of posterity and extend their memory by their works, to them no death is anything but sudden, since it always breaks off something just begun. 5Gaius Fannius, indeed, had a foreboding long beforehand of what happened. 5He dreamed in the quiet of the night that he was lying on his couch, settled in the posture of a man studying, with his book-box in front of him — that was his habit; 5next he imagined that Nero had come, sat down on the couch, taken out the first book which he had published about his crimes, and unrolled it to the end; 5that he did the same with the second and third, and then went away.
6He was terrified, and interpreted it as if the end of his writing would be the same as had been the end of Nero's reading: and it was the same. 7When I recall this, pity comes over me at how many sleepless nights, how much labour he spent in vain. 7My own mortality, my own writings, come into my mind. 7And I do not doubt that you too are alarmed by the same thought, on behalf of the work you have in hand. 8So, while life lasts, let us strive that death may find as little as possible that it can destroy. 8Farewell.