To the same person. (361?)
The man who makes my lecture hall a fine theater is the rhetor Megethius. He shouts with the volume of fifty men, and with that voice he has often stopped a speaker in his tracks. A warm listener who interrupts the flow of a speech with cries of wonder is, I think, a great thing for any speaker.
At my public lectures I repay his cheering with a smile and a friendly greeting. But now I have found, through you, a grander way to repay him. You disciplined his brother with a fine -- or rather, you disciplined him with the fear of it and then helped arrange for the penalty to be lifted.
Your written order and your ruling say the money should be returned, but the money, for reasons unknown, refuses to find its way into their hands. So either persuade it or compel it not to flee its owners -- so that they may have what is theirs, and so that nothing you have ordered may come to nothing.
The man who makes my lecture hall a fine theater is the rhetor Megethius. He shouts with the volume of fifty men, and with that voice he has often stopped a speaker in his tracks. A warm listener who interrupts the flow of a speech with cries of wonder is, I think, a great thing for any speaker.
At my public lectures I repay his cheering with a smile and a friendly greeting. But now I have found, through you, a grander way to repay him. You disciplined his brother with a fine -- or rather, you disciplined him with the fear of it and then helped arrange for the penalty to be lifted.
Your written order and your ruling say the money should be returned, but the money, for reasons unknown, refuses to find its way into their hands. So either persuade it or compel it not to flee its owners -- so that they may have what is theirs, and so that nothing you have ordered may come to nothing.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.