Letter 818
To Gaios. (~363 AD)
The poem is a praise of a skilled rhetorician, but when I search within myself for those many great qualities, I find none. Still, I have profited by learning what one must do to be a good writer — though I remain among those who produce poor work.
If you disagree, that is no surprise: affection has a way of deceiving. This is precisely why I so admired the men to whom I showed the encomium — they came away saying they had seen a great deal of the poet's love for the rhetorician.
I am at a loss what to do. If I hide such fine verses, I wrong the man who composed them; but if I display them, I will be laughed at for imagining I am the person in the poem.
How to wrong neither you nor myself I shall have to consider. But by crowning Eudaimon first, you did exactly what I would have done had I been a poet — for that man was sure to repay the favor in kind, poem for poem. People generally prefer those more like themselves to those less so.
So I am more grateful for the honor than I am concerned about who came first.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.