Letter 141: Cyriacus is teased as a man ruled by appetite who swallowed the seasonal cake.

Procopius of GazaCyriacus, correspondent of Procopius of Gaza|c. 515 AD|Procopius of Gaza|From Gaza, Palaestina Prima|AI-assisted
late antique Greek letters; Cyriacus; food; gifts; Ajax; comedy; appetite
The Ajax comparison turns a food joke into Homeric comedy.

Your gifts are of that sort; mine you yourself would praise, since you are so indulgent toward the stomach. You are a greedy man, someone who has made belly-service a discipline and measures great happiness by food. If you hunt up anything pleasant anywhere, you immediately stretch out your tongue like Ajax with the great shield. The season is witness: you snatched the cake from other people and at once sent the whole thing into your mouth.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

[Κυριακῶι] Τὰ μὲν σὰ δῶρα τοιαῦτα· τὰ δὲ ἡμέτερα κἂν αὐτὸς ἐπαινέσειας οὕτω τῇ γαστρὶ χαριζόμενος. λίχνος γάρ τις ὢν καὶ τὸ γαστρίζεσθαι μελέτην πεποιημένος καὶ βρώμασι τὴν μεγάλην εὐδαιμονίαν μετρῶν, εἴ πού τι θηράσαις ἡδύ, προτείνεις εὐθέως τὴν γλῶτταν, καθάπερ τις Αἴας τὴν μεγάλην ἀσπίδα. καὶ μάρτυς ὁ καιρὸς ἐν ᾧ τὸν πλακοῦντα παρ' ἑτέρων ὑφήρπασας, ὅλον εὐθὺς παραπέμψας τῷ στόματι.

Revision history

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

    Initial corpus import from modern procopius gaza batch9 matia greek v1.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://www.matia.gr/pisth/pdf/pg_migne/Procopius_of_Gaza_PG_87a-87c/Epistulae.pdf

Related Letters