Twelve Books of Letters and Lectures

lent ones could not have been chosen at all. I, therefore, my Piero—both that I may do a favor for the city which has always treated me with kindness and humanity, and that I may comply with you, who request honorable things and than whom nothing more dear to me lives on earth—shall briefly embrace in this letter what I have found in the records of literature concerning the founders of this city, and then I shall subjoin a few things concerning the name itself. And since it is sufficiently established that the Fiesolans were also received into a part of the citizenship, I shall explain from whence I believe Fiesole was also named. The Triumvirs, therefore—Gaius Caesar, who was later Augustus; Marcus Antonius; and Marcus Lepidus, also the Pontifex Maximus—founded Florence as a colony. The colonists led out, moreover, were Caesarian soldiers, to whom two hundred iugera were assigned according to the cardines and decumani; this I find in Julius Frontinus, a most celebrated writer who flourished in the age of Nerva, in his book On the Measurements of Lands, which book you, Piero de' Medici, possess at home in a most ancient manuscript. Thus, as has happened to no other city, Florence took its rise from three emperors, of whom one was the greatest of all, and another also the Pontifex Maximus. The first Florentine citizens, moreover, were those men against whose valor no arms, no fortifications, and no strengths stood firm. Having explored its origin, let us also investigate the cause of its name. It is recorded that there were three names for the city of Rome: one, this which we have mentioned, which is well-known; another, which was secret, from which Amaryllis