and who
O’er Ind and Garamant extreme
Shall stretch his reign,
as thy Mantuan friend once sang?[23] I feel sure that thou art most eager to hear such and similar tidings, owing to thy loyalty and the love thou didst bear the fatherland, a love remaining constant even unto death. But it is better to pass over such subjects in silence. Believe me, Cicero, if thou wert to learn of the fallen state of our country, thou wouldst weep bitter tears, be it a region of Heaven that thou inhabitest, or of Hades. Forever farewell.
From the land of the living, on the left bank of the Rhone, in Transpadane Gaul, in the same year, on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of January (at Avignon, December 19, 1345).
Notes on Fam., XXIV, 4, to Cicero
[12]. Terence, Andria, i, 1, 41. Petrarch’s words, “ut ipse soles dicere, quod ait familiaris tuus in Andria” (Vol. III, p. 264), are proof that he was not quoting Terence directly, but the De amicitia. In chap. 89 of the latter we read, “Quod in Andria familiaris meus dicit,” and then follows the verse in question. The speaker is of course Laelius, of whom Terence was in fact a friend. Petrarch, therefore, has either momentarily lost sight of the speaker, or, realizing full well that Laelius is Cicero’s mouth-piece, has consciously identified the two. This would, of course, make Terence a friend of Cicero; the “familiaris meus” of the De amicitia and the “familiaris tuus” of Petrarch both, therefore, become equivalent to “familiaris Ciceronis.”
[13]. There is a passage in the De finibus in which Cicero especially contrasts the teachings of Epicurus with his life. It is ii, 80 and 81: