The Life of Augustus, 85

Suetonius  translated by J. C. Rolfe

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85He wrote numerous works of various kinds in prose, some of which he read to a group of his intimate friends, as others did in a lecture-room; for example, his “Reply to Brutus on Cato.” At the reading of these volumes he had all but come to the end, when he grew tired and handed them to Tiberius to finish, for he was well on in years. He also wrote “Exhortations to Philosophy” and some volumes of an Autobiography, giving an account of his life in thirteen books up to the time of the Cantabrian war, but no farther. 2His essays in poetry were but slight. One book has come down to us written in hexameter verse, of which the subject and the title is “Sicily.” There is another, equally brief, of “Epigrams,” which he composed for the most part at the time of the bath. Though he began a tragedy with much enthusiasm, he destroyed it because his style did not satisfy him, and when some of his friends asked him what in the world had become of Ajax, he answered that “his Ajax had fallen on his sponge.”

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