Letter 9017: I have received your letter in which you complain how offensive to you a really magnificent banquet was, owing to...
To Genitor.
I have received your letter in which you complain how offensive to you a really magnificent banquet was, owing to the fact that there were buffoons, dancers, and jesters going round from table to table. Ah ! will you never relax that severe frown of yours even a little ? For my own part, I do not provide any such entertainments like those, but I can put up with those who do. Why then do I not provide them myself? For this reason, that if any dancer makes a lewd movement, if a buffoon is impudent, or a jester makes a senseless fool of himself, it does not amuse me a whit, for I see no novelty or fun in it. I am not giving you a high moral reason, but am only telling you my individual taste. Yet think how many people there are who would regard with disfavour, as partly insipid and partly wearisome, the entertainments which charm and attract you and me. When a reader, or a musician, or a comic actor enters the banqueting-room, how many there are who call for their shoes or lie back on their couches just as completely bored as you were, when you endured what you describe as those monstrosities ! Let us then make allowances for what pleases other people, so that we may induce others to make allowances for us ! Farewell.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
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