Letter 5015: It is when I try to equal your verses that I most fully appreciate how excellent they are.
To Arrius Antoninus.
It is when I try to equal your verses that I most fully appreciate how excellent they are. For just as painters rarely succeed in putting a perfectly beautiful face on their canvas without doing injustice to the original, so, though I slave hard with your verses as my model, I always fall short. Let me urge you then to publish as many as possible, so good that everyone will burn to imitate them, and yet no one, or but very few, will succeed in the attempt. Farewell.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
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