1I have read your book and, as carefully as I could, noted what I thought should be changed and what removed. 1For I am accustomed to tell the truth, and you to hear it gladly. 1For no one bears criticism more patiently than those who most deserve praise. 2Now I am waiting for my own book from you, with your notes. 2O pleasant, o lovely exchange! 2How it delights me that, if posterity takes any interest in us, it will be told everywhere in what harmony, frankness and loyalty we lived! 3It will be rare and remarkable that two men, almost equal in age and rank, of some name in letters — for I am forced to speak of you too rather sparingly, since I am speaking of myself at the same time — fostered each other's studies.
4For my part, as a very young man, when you were already flourishing in fame and glory, I longed to follow you, to be, and to be thought, 'next to you, though by a long interval'. 4And there were many very brilliant talents; 4but you seemed to me — so the likeness of our natures led me — the most imitable and the most worthy of imitation. 5So I am all the more glad that, if there is any talk of literature, we are named together, and that when people speak of you, I come to mind at once. 5Nor are there wanting those who are preferred to both of us.
6But we — it makes no difference to me in what place — are joined; 6for to me he is first who is next to you. 6Indeed, you must have noticed it in wills too: unless someone happens to be a particularly close friend of one of us, we receive the same legacies, and in equal amounts. 7All this points to one end, that we should love each other more ardently, since so many bonds — our studies, characters and reputation, and finally men's last judgements — bind us together. 7Farewell.