Letter 10013: The news from the Danube frontier has been better in the past month than in the previous year, which is a relief;...

If the merits of your divine clemency be considered, no wealth, such as either nature supplies or fortune carries round about, will equal the gratitude of our love toward you; but, as my opinion holds, the public judgment concerning the best of emperors is not to be measured by gifts. The senate, nonetheless, prompt in its devotion, eagerly takes up of its own accord every part of the duties by which affection is made known, and entreats your saving divine power that, in this offering, which has added something to the previous ones, you may understand this to have been our care: that we should not seem to have less power under your reign. For to your deified parents a smaller sum was decreed to each on account of their tenth year; and even the deified brother of your gentleness, when he was completing the third five-year period of his imperial life, is affirmed to have been honored with a more sparing munificence. Now our zeal has grown into love for you. For our devoted order has promised sixteen hundred pounds of gold, to be contributed by city weights, for the festival of the tenth year of your reign, that is, by the assay of the more generous balance. But if the senate had had strength equal to its spirit, you would know that in the public love of your perpetuity there lie riches. Yet it preferred to please by the faithfulness of consolation to your clemency rather than by the magnitude of a treacherous pledge. Thereafter, under a youthful emperor, a sound measure of gift is the wish to make offerings often. Far be it from us to press upon a good prince more than we are able; for indeed the generosity of those who love does not by right wear down those who offer. Therefore now also gladly receive from the sacred treasury the subsidies decreed, and reserve for the future advances of your reign the hope of like services.