1Now at last our spirit is returning; 1but although at the very first dawn of a most blessed age Nerva Caesar has combined things once incompatible, the principate and liberty, and although Nerva Trajan is daily increasing the happiness of the times, and public security has taken on not only hope and prayers but the assurance and strength of that very prayer, nevertheless by the nature of human weakness remedies work more slowly than ills; 1and as our bodies grow slowly and are quickly extinguished, so you would crush talents and studies more easily than you would revive them: for even the sweetness of idleness itself steals over us, and the sloth that was at first hateful is in the end loved.
2What then, if over fifteen years, a great span of mortal life, many have perished by chance misfortunes, and all the most energetic by the cruelty of the emperor, and we few are survivors, so to speak, not only of others but even of ourselves, so many years having been taken out of the middle of our lives, in which we have come in silence, young men to old age, old men almost to the very limits of a completed life. 3Yet I shall not regret having composed, even in an unskilled and rough voice, a record of our former servitude and a testimony to our present blessings. 3Meanwhile this book, intended to honour Agricola my father-in-law, will be either praised or excused by its profession of filial devotion.