Letter 347: Every bishop is a thing out of which it is very hard to get anything. The further you have advanced beyond other people in learning, the more you make me afraid that you will refuse what I ask. I want some rafters.
Every bishop is practically impossible to get anything out of. And the further you've surpassed everyone else in learning, the more I worry you'll refuse what I'm asking.
I need some rafters. Any other rhetorician would have called them "stakes" or "poles" — not because that's actually what he needed, but just to show off his precious vocabulary. I'm asking for rafters because I need rafters.
If you don't send them, I'll be spending the winter outdoors.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
Since you do take my jokes kindly, I send you the rest. My prelude is from Homer. Come now and change your theme, And sing of the inner adornment.
(Written about the same time, in reply to another letter now lost.) I do not like being joked about Tiberina and its mud and its winters, O my friend, who are so free from mud, and who walk on tiptoe, and trample on the plains. You who have wings and are borne aloft, and fly like the arrows of Abaris, in order that, Cappadocian though you are, y...
(In answer to Ep. XIV., of Basil, about 361.) You may mock and pull to pieces my affairs, whether in jest or in earnest. This is a matter of no consequence; only laugh, and take your fill of culture, and enjoy my friendship.
Will you not give over, Basil, packing this sacred haunt of the Muses with Cappadocians, and these redolent of the frost and snow and all Cappadocia's good things? They have almost made me a Cappadocian too, always chanting their I salute you. I must endure, since it is Basil who commands.