The Correspondence of Coluccio Salutati (Vol. 1)

IIII.

TO GASPARE SQUARO DE’ BROASPINI.

[L¹, c. 71 B; M¹, c. 21 B; G², c. 20 B; R¹, c. 35 B; C, c. 12 B.]

Florence, July 12, 1381. Weary of the importunate and insistent demands,

Importunate, querulous, hostile, troublesome, and finally insulting—I know not whether I should say "dearest friend." Behold, I return to you your little book; which I wish I had never seen, lest in its pages I should have recognized how brittle, how leaden, how base, and how fragile your friendship was, which over some most worthless notebook has so often he returns to him the Ciceronian letters he had received on loan. and so rudely raged against me; I return it (¹). You have your letters; you have what you were demanding with such talkativeness. I owe nothing more. Thanks be to my God, for I have broken the snare of obligation with which you were so sharply summoning me: "the snare is broken, and we are delivered" (²). Delivered, indeed, by the standards of those who reckon friendships by the account-book; Yet he will not cease to be his friend on this account. yet from that true affection of love by which I am once joined to you, I cannot be separated. Though you may be rebuked, though you may commit some offense against the duty of friendship, I shall never be released from it. For if we love riches despite the perpetual stings of anxiety; if we love our own foul and unclean flesh, which drags us into so many detestable things through the tyranny of lust; if, finally, we rejoice to our own harm in the errors of this life, what ought we to do in the case of friendship? Should we not preserve it even amidst the insolence of friends and the darts of injuries? Bark, then, and even if you take on the feigned shape of Cerberus, sound forth with a three-throated bark: I shall nonetheless be your friend. As for your...

(1) This refers to the volume containing several letters of Cicero, which Gaspare de’ Broaspini had lent to Salutati in 1375; cf. lib. III, ep. XXIIII, I, 222.
(2) Psalm CXXIII, 7 [124:7].