Letter 635: Herodianus has been granted a short leave by us, so that he may go and see the small piece of land he owns.

LibaniusAnatolios|c. 374 AD|Libanius|AI-assisted
education booksproperty economics

To Anatolius. (361)

A brief span of time has been granted by us to Herodianus, so that he may go and look upon the small piece of land that he holds. And he has need of his little holdings in Phoenicia, since what comes to him from his profession is even smaller than those. For the fact that men who ought not to be great have become so has brought low the fortunes of those who would reasonably be great.

So let the Phoenicians become aware that you have a care both for this man and for what belongs to him. For from small things there might perhaps come some gain, whenever the goodwill of a governor [...]

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

Ἀνατολίῳ. (361)

Ἡρωδιανῷ δέδοται παρ’ ἡμῶν χρόνος βραχύς, ὅπως ἣν
ἔχει γῆν βραχεῖαν ἐλθὼν ἴδῃ. δεῖ δὲ αὐτῷ τῶν ἐν Φοινίκη
μικρῶν, ἐπειδὴ τὰ ἀπὸ τῆς τέχνης ἔτ’ ἐκείνων μικρότερα. τὸ
γὰρ οὓς οὐ προσῆκεν εἶναι μεγάλους ἐταπείνωσε τὰ τῶν εἰκό-
τως ἂν ὄντων μεγάλων.

γενέσθω δὴ τοῖς Φοίνιξιν αἴσθη-
σις ὅτι σοὶ καὶ τούτου καὶ τῶν τούτου μέλει. καὶ γὰρ ἀπὸ
τῶν μικρῶν γένοιτ’ ἂν ἴσως τι κέρδος, ὅταν εὔνοιαν ἄρχοντος

Revision history

  1. 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import

    Initial corpus import from modern libanius retranslated v1.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek/blob/master/volume_xml/libanius_10.xml

Related Letters