Letter: Julius Caesar to Atia (45 B. c.)

Send the boy to Apollonia.

I begin abruptly, my dear niece, so that you will at once be disarmed, and so that whatever resistance you might raise will be too quick and flimsy for the force of my persuasions.

Your son left my camp at Carthage in good health; you will see him in Rome within the week. I have instructed my men to give him a leisurely journey, so that you might have this letter before his arrival.

Even now, you will have started to raise objections that seem to you to have some weight-you are a mother and a Julian, and thus doubly stubborn. I suspect I know what your objections will be; we have spoken of these matters before. You would raise the issue of his uncertain health-though you will know shortly that Gaius Octavius returns from his campaign with me in Spain more healthy than when he began it. You would question the care he might receive abroad-though a little thought should persuade you that the doctors in Apollonia are more capable of attending his ills than are the perfumed quacks in Rome. I have six legions of soldiers in and around Macedonia; and soldiers must be in good health, though senators may die and the world shall have lost little. And the Macedonian coastal weather is at least as mild as the Roman. You are a good mother, Atia, but you have that affliction of hard morality and strictness which has sometimes disturbed our line. You must loosen your reins a little and let your son become in fact the man that he is in law. He is nearly eighteen, and you remember the portents at his birth-portents which, as you are aware, I have taken pains to augment.

You must understand the importance of the command with which I began this letter. His Greek is atrocious, and his rhetoric is weak; his philosophy is fair, but his knowledge of literature is eccentric, to say the least. Are the tutors of Rome as slothful and careless as the citizens? In Apollonia he will read philosophy and improve his Greek with Athenodorus; he will enlarge his knowledge of literature and perfect his rhetoric with Apollodorus. I have already made the necessary arrangements.