Letter 8022: You claim to be living the country life -- tending vines and grafting fruit trees, nursing a vigorous old age.

You assert that you are playing the countryman, and that by training vines or grafting trees you are nursing your raw old age. Your letter does not have this flavor about it, unless perhaps your Gaul has led you down from Helicon [the muses' mountain]. Some furrows you turn over with your pen, others you set in order by their rows. I, however, since you desire to know our affairs, lie torpid in the home of Latin eloquence amid leisure and study. The gods will grant the addition of years to my little boy. He himself, with Fortune's leave that I have invoked, will call me into the partnership of his own studies. In the meantime, prod my idleness with frequent letters. For indeed this one kind of literature alone is left to me after the bitter misfortunes of my speeches, which me [...]