The officials of the contest and of the company proclaimed it a historic step that would make the game more exciting still. The fans, on the other hand, as the same report relates, cry out that merchants' greed hides beneath the mask of the common good. What gave most offence was Rick Clark, one of the contest's executives, who said that he knew many fans did not approve of the expansion; that their view had been weighed, considered and taken into the decision; that the fans are the very lifeblood of the game and are owed the finest contest; but that they had nonetheless decided to go ahead. It is an elegant style of speech: it praises those it disdains, and listens to those it does not follow. I confess, though, that I almost prefer this candour to the flatteries I have often heard in the Senate; here at least no one pretends to obey the people. Nor am I too indulgent to the fans. For they complain, not that young men sent to college for their studies are being turned into actors, but that their game is being changed; and what I once wrote is true: "now they favour a cloth, they love a cloth." And now the cloth is not even their own, but hired.

You remember Nero, who, so that he might collect every crown in a single tour, had the Greeks gather their festivals, which used to fall in different years, into one: the order of the ancestors gave way to a prince's pleasure. Here it is not a prince but a company of spectacles that rearranges the calendar. What seems to me gravest is that the conference championships are abolished, in which neighbouring colleges, like bordering towns, contended for the glory of their region. Love of place fed that rivalry, just as my Comum delights in boasting over Milan; the new order melts everything into one spectacle to be broadcast across the whole earth. So it comes about that the man who once shouted for his college and his region now shouts for a glowing panel on the wall. Nor do more games bring variety: "nothing new, nothing varied, nothing that one viewing does not suffice for"; and the more often the same thing is watched, the less anyone remembers what he saw.

You will ask who profits. The report counts the money but does not divide it: it does not say how so great a sum is to be shared among the conferences and the colleges, nor which of the college heads was the author of abolishing the conference games, nor whether anything comes back to the young men, who will be loaded in winter with more games and more journeys. Were I still governing Bithynia, I would refer these questions to the emperor before all else; for at Nicomedia I learned that works begun at great expense often end in ruins, seldom in accounts. A college, my dear Calvisius, is not a circus but a school; and since parents send their sons there to be educated in letters, it is strange that its heads deliberate more carefully over the number of games than over the number of books.

The remedy is simple and, to my mind, seemly. Let the heads of the colleges, who are the guardians of the young, lay their accounts open; let what the games bring in go to libraries and studies; let them not sell their students' winter. And let the fans, if they are truly offended, switch off the glowing panel, for nothing answers a seller more surely than not buying. I, as usual, shall sit at home among my books and, while others argue about teams, "take some pleasure in the fact that this pleasure takes no hold of me." Farewell.