1Ummidia Quadratilla has died a little short of her eightieth year, vigorous right up to her last illness, and with a body compact and sturdy even beyond what is usual in a married woman. 2She died leaving a most honourable will: she left her grandson heir to two-thirds, her granddaughter to one third. 2The granddaughter I hardly know; the grandson I love most intimately, an exceptional young man, deserving to be loved among his relatives not only by those to whom he is related by blood. 3First, though conspicuous for his good looks, he escaped all the gossip of the malicious both as a boy and as a young man; he was a husband before his twenty-fourth year, and, had god consented, would have been a father.
3He lived in the household of his pleasure-loving grandmother most austerely, and yet most dutifully. 4She kept pantomime actors and indulged them more lavishly than befits a woman of the highest rank. 4Quadratus did not watch them, either in the theatre or at home, nor did she demand it. 5I heard her say herself, when she was commending her grandson's studies to me, that she was accustomed, as a woman in the idleness of her sex, to relax her mind with a game of draughts, and accustomed to watch her pantomimes, but that whenever she was about to do either, she always told her grandson to go away and study; 5which she seemed to me to do not so much out of love for him as out of respect.
6You will be surprised, and I was surprised too. 6At the recent priestly games, when the pantomimes had been brought on at the opening, as Quadratus and I were leaving the theatre together, he said to me: 'Do you know that today, for the first time, I saw my grandmother's freedman dance?' 6So said the grandson. 7But, by Hercules, utter strangers, to honour Quadratilla — I am ashamed to have said honour — would run to the theatre by way of flattering service, leap up, applaud, admire, and then reproduce for their mistress every gesture, with the songs; 7and now they will receive very tiny legacies, a tip for their theatrical services, from the heir who did not watch.
8I write this because you are not unwilling to hear if anything new has happened, and then because it is pleasant to me to relive in writing the joy I had felt. 8For I rejoice at the dutifulness of the dead woman and at the honour done to an excellent young man; 8I am glad too that the house that once belonged to Gaius Cassius, the founder and father of the Cassian school, will serve a master no less great. 9For my Quadratus will fill it and grace it, and restore to it again its former dignity, renown and glory, since as great an orator will come forth from it as that man was a jurist.
9Farewell.