To Barbatio.
Our entire family both gains good things and escapes bad ones through you. Iamblichus is, within our family, a "conspicuous star" in Pindar's phrase: self-controlled, fair-minded, modest, a lover of literature, above the lure of money, and incapable of forgetting a kindness once received. So if you do everything for him, you will be devoting yourself to the best of us.
I write this now not to get you to start helping the young man -- you have been doing that for some time -- but so that you will continue what you began, and so that you may share my satisfaction that I care for this man, whom I would have wronged by not caring for.
Our entire family both gains good things and escapes bad ones through you. Iamblichus is, within our family, a "conspicuous star" in Pindar's phrase: self-controlled, fair-minded, modest, a lover of literature, above the lure of money, and incapable of forgetting a kindness once received. So if you do everything for him, you will be devoting yourself to the best of us.
I write this now not to get you to start helping the young man -- you have been doing that for some time -- but so that you will continue what you began, and so that you may share my satisfaction that I care for this man, whom I would have wronged by not caring for.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.