? Pudentilla throws your words in your teeth and publicly
vindicates her sanity against your slanderous aspersions. The motive
or necessity of her marriage, whichever it was, she now ascribes to
fate, and between fate and magic there is a great gulf, indeed they
have absolutely nothing in common. For if it be true that the destiny
of each created thing is like a fierce torrent that may neither be
stayed nor diverted, what power is left for magic drugs or
incantations? Pudentilla, therefore, not only denied that I was a
magician, but denied the very existence of magic. It is a good thing
that Pontianus, following his usual custom, kept his mother's letter
safe in its entirety: it is a good thing that the speed with which
this case has been hurried on left you no opportunity for adding to
that letter at your leisure. For this I have to thank you and your
foresight, Maximus. You saw through their slanders from the beginning
and hurried on the case that they might not gather strength as the
days went by; you gave them no breathing space and wrecked their
designs. Suppose now that the mother, after her wont, _had_ made
confession of her passion for me in some private letter to her son.
Was it just, Rufinus, was it consistent, I will not say with filial
piety but with common humanity, that these letters should be
circulated and, above all, published and proclaimed abroad by her own
son? But perhaps I am no better than a fool to ask you to have regard
for another's sense of decency when you have so long lost your own.

[Footnote 26: [Greek: ten heimarmenen echo] (Rossbach).]

85. Why should I only complain of what is past? The present is equally
distressing. To think that this unhappy boy should have been so
corrupted by you as to read aloud in the proconsular court, before a
man of such lofty character as Claudius Maximus, a letter from his
mother, which he chooses to regard as amatory, and in the presence of
the statues of the emperor Pius to accuse his mother of yielding to a
shameful passion and reproach her with her _amours_? Who is there of
such gentle temper, but that this would wake him to fury? Vilest of
creatures, do you pry into your mother's heart in such matters, do you
watch her glances, count her sighs, sound her affections, intercept
her letters, and accuse her of being in love? Do you seek to discover
what she does in the privacy of her own chamber, do you demand--I will
not say that she should be above love