Thursday, October 23, 2008

John Singer Sargent Chiron and Achilles painting

John Singer Sargent Chiron and Achilles paintingJohn Singer Sargent Campo Dei Gesuiti paintingJohn Singer Sargent Autumn on the River painting
gave a reading of Augustus's letters. She was now eighty-three years old and her voice was weak and she whistled a good deal on her s's, but for an hour and a half she held her audience spellbound. The first letters she read contained pronouncements on public policy, all of which seemed especially written as warnings against the present state of affairs at Rome. There were some very opposite remarks about treason trials, including the following paragraph:
"Though I have been bound to protect myself legally against all sorts of libel I shall exert myself to the utmost, my dear Livia, to avoid staging so unpleasant a spectacle as a trial, for treason, of any foolish historian, caricaturist or epigram-maker who has made me a target of his wit or eloquence. My father Julius Cassar forgave the poet Catullus the most filthy lampoons imaginable: he wrote to Catullus that if he were trying to show that he was no servile flatterer like most of his fellow-poets, he had now fully proved his case and could return to other more poetical subjects

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