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[4] For while you were pleading with me again and again to write something on friendship, the subject appealed to me as both worthy of general study, and also well fitted to our intimacy. Therefore I have not been unwilling to benefit the public at your request. But, as in my Cato the Elder, which was written to you on the subject of old age, I represented Cato, when an old man, as the principal speaker, because I thought no one more suitable to talk of that period of life than he who had been old a very long time and had been a favourite of fortune in old age beyond other men; so, since we had learned from our forefathers that the intimacy of Gaius Laelius and Publius Scipio was most noteworthy, [p. 113] I concluded that Laelius was a fit person to expound the very views on friendship which Scaevola remembered that he had maintained. Besides, discourses of this kind seem in some way to acquire greater dignity when founded on the influence of men of ancient times, especially such as are renowned; and, hence, in reading my own work on Old Age I am at times so affected that I imagine Cato is the speaker and not myself.

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load focus Introduction (William Armistead Falconer, 1923)
load focus Latin (William Armistead Falconer, 1923)
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