CX — To FUSCUS
You are much pleased, I find, with the account I gave you in my former letter of how I spend the summer season at Tuscum, and desire to know what alteration I make in my method when I am at Laurentum in the winter. None at all, except abridging myself of my sleep at noon, and borrowing a good piece of the night before daybreak and after sunset for study: and if business is very urgent (which in winter very frequently happens), instead of having interludes or music after supper, I reconsider whatever I have previously dictated, and improve my memory at the same time by this frequent mental revision. Thus I have given you a general sketch of my mode of life in summer and winter; to which you may add the intermediate seasons of spring and autumn, in which, while losing nothing out of the day, I gain but little from the night. Farewell.
FOOTNOTES TO THE LETTERS OF PLINY]
1 ([return])
[ A pupil and intimate friend of Paetus Thrasea, the distinguished Stoic philosopher. Arulenus was put to death by Domitian for writing a panegyric upon Thrasea.]
2 ([return])
[ The impropriety of this expression, in the original, seems to he in the word stigmosum, which Regulus, probably either coined through affectation or used through ignorance. It is a word, at least, which does not occur in any author of authority: the translator has endeavoured, therefore, to preserve the same sort of impropriety, by using an expression of like unwarranted stamp in his own tongue. M.]