Letter 445: You know how pleasantly good repute is nourished, when it is well tended.
To Oaios.
Just as wine, when poured in to excess, fills all the passages and pipes and membranes of perception, and turns the understanding toward folly, so too anger, leaping outside the heavenly order, renders the mind a work of drunkenness, making the intellect a maenad [a frenzied bacchant], and dissolving by its drunken violence the order of sobriety. Let us therefore abstain from both, besieging the citadel of the mind neither with drink nor with anger.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
Ὥσπερ ὁ οἶνος ὑπερκορὴς ἐγχεόμενος, τοὺς τῆς αἰσθήσεως ἅπαντας καὶ πόρους καὶ αὐλοὺς καὶ μήνιγγας πληροῖ, καὶ τρέπει πρὸς ἄνοιαν τὴν διάνοιαν· οὕτω καὶ [ὁ] θυμὸς ἔξω τῆς οὐρανίῳ τάξεως πηδῶν, μέθης ἔργον ἀποφαίνει τὸν νοῦν, μαινάδα τὴν φρένα ποιῶν, καὶ λύων παροινίᾳ τὴν τάξιν τῆς νήψεως. Ἀμφοτέρων τοιγαροῦν ἀποσχώμεθα, οὔτε ποτῷ οὔτε θυμῷ πολιορκοῦντες τοῦ νοῦς τὴν ἀκρόπολιν.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern isidore pelusium workflow v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/PatrologiaGraeca
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