I am fully confident, and do not doubt, that by the divine gift a common gladness has been announced to our common presence. For, as I suspect has already reached you too, even those who were said to be laying waste the frontier have withdrawn. Wherefore, out of solicitude, I have dispatched these lines, that you may indicate whatever may afterward reach you concerning any increase of security; or whether free return to the city has at last drawn you away from your habit—nay rather from your love—of the siege. Besides, I ask that you give orders for that little roll of wax which you promised to be sent to me, together with a short note of instruction. So far, familiarly: from here what remains, since it now pleases me, I will set forth a little more cheerfully.
The signet-ring, then, which your devotion has deigned not so much to promise as to offer, I wish to be made in this fashion. On an iron ring, quite slender, to be closed as it were by little dolphins running together into each other, let a form of a double seal be inserted upon twin little hinges. So that, as it shall please, alternately—whether hidden or displayed—it may be changed before the eyes of beholders by the alternating face now of a blooming gemstone, now of pale amber. And not indeed such amber as lately, as I myself perceived, was showing dull upon the holy and most pure luster of that undefiled hand, in which I would believe there was a mixture of gold not yet refined in the furnace—corrupted rather than compounded:
or at least not that amber which very lately the king of the Getae, as a foreboding of the ruin to follow, had appointed to confirm the adulteration in the public coinage. But let the color be of such a kind that, equally and modestly drawing its ruddiness from gold, its whiteness from silver, its preciousness from both, and its brilliance from the rest, an artful, intermediate loveliness of green may commend it. If you ask what is to be engraved on the seal: let the sign of my monogram be read by the token of my name written round about. The middle of the ring, moreover, on that part which will be next to the closed palm, shall be held by the tails of the dolphins whose heads we described above. In these a little stone, sought for this very purpose—oblong, that is, and formed with sharp ends—shall be set.
Behold, you have as it were only a mirror of the design to be carried out. Yet I do not so constrain the fullness of your elegance to the aforesaid model, as though it were not free to add what seems good. It will further be permitted to your overflowing genius to go beyond the bounds of the prescribed commission. But at the end of the letter, for a clayey work without which nonetheless the matter will not be accomplished, my grubby discourse demands that you send at once a craftsman potter, to be kept a short while, who may instruct us by what measurements the vaulted upper chamber of an oven is to be built, or within what space, in a pit of dug-out earth hedged with filth, the glue of baked clay may be softened by the feet of animals.