1You ask how I think you ought to study in the retreat which you have now long been enjoying. 2It is useful above all, and many recommend it, to translate either from Greek into Latin or from Latin into Greek. 2By this kind of exercise are acquired propriety and splendour of vocabulary, a wealth of figures, power of exposition, and besides, through imitating the best writers, a facility for inventing things like theirs; 2at the same time, what would have escaped you as a reader cannot escape you as a translator. 3Understanding and judgement are gained from this. 3It will do no harm, when you have read something just far enough to grasp its matter and argument, to write on it as if in rivalry, to compare your version with what you have read, and to weigh carefully what you, and what the author, have done more aptly.
3Great cause for congratulation if you have done some things better, great shame if he has done everything better. 3It will be permissible sometimes even to choose very famous passages and to compete with those you have chosen. 4This contest is bold, yet not shameless, because it is private: though we see that many have taken on contests of this kind with great credit, and, by not despairing, have outstripped those whom they thought it enough to follow. 5You will also be able to revise what you have delivered once you have forgotten it, to keep much, to pass over more, to insert some things and to rewrite others. 6That is laborious and full of tedium, but fruitful through its very difficulty: to grow warm again from the start and recover an impetus that has been broken and dropped, and finally to weave new limbs, as it were, into a finished body without disturbing the earlier ones.
7I know that at present your chief pursuit is oratory; 7but I would not for that reason always recommend this combative and, so to speak, warlike style. 7For just as fields are renewed by varied and changing seeds, so our minds are by now this kind of exercise, now that. 8I want you sometimes to take up some passage of history, I want you to write a letter with special care. 8For often in a speech too the need arises for descriptions not merely historical but almost poetic, and a concise and pure style is learnt from letters. 9It is right also to relax with poetry — I do not mean continuous and long, for that cannot be completed except in leisure, but this witty and brief kind, which aptly breaks up business and cares, however great they may be.
10They are called trifles; 10but these trifles sometimes win no less fame than serious works. 10And indeed — for why should I not urge you to verse in verse? 10— just as wax wins praise if, soft and yielding, it follows skilled fingers and becomes the work it is bidden to, and now shapes Mars or chaste Minerva, now models Venus, now Venus' boy; 11and as sacred springs do not only quench fires, but often also refresh flowers and the meadows of spring, so it befits the mind of man to be bent and led, with a learned flexibility, through arts that are not rigid. 12So the greatest orators, and the greatest men too, used in this way either to exercise or to amuse themselves — or rather they amused and exercised themselves at once.
13For it is remarkable how the mind is both braced and relaxed by these little works. 13For they admit loves, hatreds, angers, pity, wit, in short everything that has a place in life and also in the forum and the courts. 14There is in these too the same benefit as in other poems, that after being bound by the constraints of metre we take delight in prose, and we write more gladly what the comparison shows to be easier. 15You have more, perhaps, than you were asking for; 15yet I have left out one thing. 15For I have not said what I think should be read: although I did say it, when I said what should be written.
15Remember to choose carefully the authors in each genre. 15For they say that one should read much, not many things. 16Who these authors are is so well known and approved that it needs no pointing out; 16and besides, I have stretched out my letter so immoderately that, while advising you how you ought to study, I have taken away your time for studying. 16Why then do you not take up your tablets again and write something of these kinds, or that very piece which you had begun? 16Farewell.