1So Galba, taking Piso by the hand, is said to have spoken in this fashion: 'If I were a private citizen adopting you by a curiate law before the pontiffs, as is customary, it would be a fine thing for me to bring into my household the offspring of Gnaeus Pompeius and Marcus Crassus, and a distinction for you to have added the honours of the Sulpician and Lutatian houses to your nobility: as it is, called to the empire by the consent of gods and men, I have been moved by your outstanding character and by love of my country to offer to you, a man at peace, the principate for which our ancestors fought with arms and which I won by war, following the example of the deified Augustus, who placed in the position next to himself his sister's son Marcellus, then his son-in-law Agrippa, then his grandsons, and finally his stepson Tiberius Nero.
1But Augustus sought a successor in his own house, I in the state, not because I have no relatives or comrades in war, but because I myself did not accept the empire out of ambition, and let it be proof of my judgement that I have passed over not only my own connections, whom I have set below you, but yours too. 1You have a brother of equal nobility, older than you, worthy of this fortune if you were not the better man. 1Your age is such that it has already escaped the passions of youth, your life such that you have nothing in your past to excuse. 1So far you have borne only adverse fortune: prosperity tests the spirit with sharper goads, because misfortunes are endured, but by good fortune we are corrupted.
1Loyalty, independence, friendship, the chief goods of the human spirit, you will indeed keep with the same steadfastness, but others will impair them by servility: flattery will burst in, and blandishments, and self-interest, the worst poison of true feeling. 1Even if you and I speak quite frankly to each other today, everyone else will speak more gladly to our fortune than to us; 1for to persuade an emperor of what is right is heavy labour, while flattery towards any emperor whatever is carried through without any feeling.'