Library of Samuel Teleki: Part One

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which, of course, Augustus once used after the state of the Roman Republic had changed and he had taken everything under his own empire in the name of Princeps, weary from civil discords, to strengthen and stabilize the forces of his power, so that he might entice the minds of citizens, distracted by the cares of new things, with the studies of letters and the sweetness of leisure, and cause them, soothed by these, to prefer safe and present things to old and dangerous ones. 1.) Tacitus, Annals, Book I, chap. 1. So that you might rightly say that letters were born and flourished along with the Roman Empire; nor did fortune ever shine more kindly upon letters and their cultivators in the city than under Augustus, the defender and stabilizer of the highest empire and the greatest patron of talents; finally, however, under Nero, slavery made every kind of study a little more free and upright, [and then] dangerous. 2.) Pliny, Ep. 5, Book III. Would that men, in extricating the evils that press upon our age,