Letter 10048: A poet of real quality has appeared among the younger men of the senatorial class; I draw your attention to him...

The duties of all the offices of state are fixed: it is the particular business of the urban prefecture to safeguard the rights of senators, O lords and emperors. Therefore I could not, given the necessity, fail to attend to the suits of most distinguished men [viri clarissimi, senatorial-rank gentlemen] pressing their just claims. From these men the palace official Eusebius, having been ordered to dig out a number of slaves, so that the inquiry concerning the estate of Catulus, a man of most distinguished memory, an inquiry already exhausted by judicial decisions and by sacred imperial responses, might be reopened, has stirred up the complaints of the leading men [optimates], who have long since been in possession of their share. Matters came accordingly to the laws, since the executor desired what the objection was repelling, and the sanctions of your divine power were invoked, those which forbade that the disputes of senators be transferred from the urban court to foreign jurisdictions. But when I maintained that the prerogative is not the same in the case of slaves, for whose petitions your perpetuity has appointed a definite judge of the case, the reply was made that a subtle petition had assailed the fortunes of most distinguished persons. Amid these proceedings, when Donatus stood among the other petitioners joined to the sacred rescript, I inquired, as is the custom, lest another be substituted under the same name, what status the man held and whether he himself had petitioned concerning the judgment about Catulus. Then he, declaring himself the slave of Hilarianus, a most distinguished man, firmly asserted that he was a stranger to the knowledge of those petitions which he is said to have submitted along with the others; and thus the credibility of the supplication appeared to waver even as regards its author. Other points, full of law and reason, were added: namely, that after frequent inquiries and after numerous rescripts issued in response to an official report [the formal dispatch sent up to the emperor], those who petitioned anew against what had been forbidden incurred the penalty of the law. For there exist on record the verdicts which, when an appeal had attempted to block them, your clemency's deified begetter [the late emperor], having been consulted by an official report, set as the limit of the inquiry. To which victory the imperial treasury added its profit, having obtained, as has been asserted, a fixed share of the estate of Catulus, a man of most distinguished memory. Since therefore the senators' suit rested upon rescripts and laws, they preferred to open their case to your justice through me rather than to vindicate it by a lawful trial, being secure in the decrees which you will preserve both by the necessity of the law and out of veneration for your deified father. And so in good confidence they have handed over the slaves; whom, to the prejudice of absent parties after the conclusion of the business, the equity of these times, as far as we presume, will not allow to be given a hearing.