HKB
3.VII.--TO CANINIUS RUFUS.
News has just come that Silius Italicus has starved himself to death at his villa near Naples. Ill-health was the cause assigned. He had an incurable corn, which made him weary of life and resolved him to face death with a determination that nothing could shake, yet to his last day he was prosperous and happy, save that he lost the younger of his two children. The elder and the better of the two still survives him in prosperous circumstances and of consular rank. During Nero's reign Silius had injured his reputation, for it was thought that he voluntarily informed against people, but he had conducted himself with prudence and courtesy as one of the friends of Vitellius; he had returned from his governorship of Asia covered with glory, and he had succeeded in obliterating the stains on his character, caused by his activity in his young days, by the admirable use he made of his retirement. He ranked among the leading men of the State, though he held no official position and excited no man's envy. People paid their respects to him and courted his society, and, though he spent much of his time on his couch, his room was always full of company who were no mere chance callers, and he passed his days in learned and scholarly conversation, when he was not busy composing. He wrote verses which show abundant pains rather than genius, and sometimes he submitted them to general criticism by having them read in public.
At last he retired from the city, prompted thereto by his great age, and settled in Campania, nor did he stir from the spot, even at the accession of the new Emperor. A Caesar deserves great credit for allowing a subject such liberty, and Italicus deserves the same for venturing to avail himself of it. He was such a keen virtuoso that he got the reputation of always itching to buy new things. He owned a number of villas in the same neighbourhood, and used to neglect his old ones through his passion for his recent purchases. In each he had any quantity of books, statues and busts, which he not only kept by him but even treated with a sort of veneration, especially the busts of Virgil, whose birthday he kept up far more scrupulously than he did his own, principally at Naples, where he used to approach the poet's monument as though it were a temple. In these peaceful surroundings he completed his seventy-fifth year, his health being delicate rather than weak, and just as he was the last consul appointed by Nero, so too in him died the sole survivor of all the consuls appointed by that Emperor. It is also a curious fact that, besides his being the last of Nero's consuls, it was in his term of office that Nero perished. When I think of this, I feel a sort of compassion for the frailty of humanity. For what is so circumscribed and so short as even the longest human life? Does it not seem to you as if Nero were alive only the other day? Yet of all those who held the consulship during his reign not one survives at the present moment.