Letter 10021: The young man I am recommending to you is someone I have watched for three years, and my confidence in him is not...

I know well enough that uprightness is, by a fault of human nature, subject to envy; but I am astonished that the plotting of my rivals has gone so far that an innocent man's reputation should be assailed with a raw lie, O lords and emperors [the imperial address ddd. imppp. = domini nostri tres imperatores]. For what would they not dare, what would they leave untried, men who, in the citadel of the world [Rome], when injuries done to the Christian law had been redressed, have invented temples avenged upon them? He wept, I suppose, the contriver of this stage-play, when he made it appear that men had been seized from the inmost recesses of the church and dragged off to torture, when he set down in writing that from distant and neighboring cities bishops were being led off in chains; for he could not otherwise, without these subtle tricks, have driven the serene spirit of Your Clemency to convene the people by a sacred edict, so that with a letter harsher than is the custom of Your Piety you might accuse the prefect whom you appointed without his soliciting it. Let him now give his reasons for the deceit, whoever he is, who, under the occasion of a just inquiry, the inquiry by which you ordered me to investigate the despoilers of the city walls, has put about that tragic interrogations were being conducted against the ministers of the Catholic church; let him make answer to the letter of Bishop Damasus [Pope Damasus I], in which he has denied that any adherents of that same religion suffered any affront whatever. I do not greatly put forward in my defense the official records of my own office, that office from which an assured account of the facts was sought precisely so that no deed might escape the recollection of the investigating magistrate: let credence be given to the bishop of that law which is alleged to have been injured; let credence be given to the Roman people, who, informed by your Eternity's edict, marvel that there should be believed in the heat of the moment what Rome knows was never committed. I pass over the injury to the prefecture and to my own conscience, since the false charge has gone so far that it touches with a certain reproach even you yourselves, the very authors of my honor. For those who blacken the judges of the highest rank seem to be impugning the readiness of your own sacred testimony. Long ago the deified father of Your Divinity [the emperor Valentinian I, recently deceased] deemed me worthy of a singular honor, that incomparable judge of merits, whose empire you received together with his character. Follow your father's example, uphold your own judgment: we who earned the prefecture without soliciting it, let us lay it down without giving offense. I am thought to have abused the suggestions of that excellent man, well deserving of the commonwealth, Praetextatus, the praetorian prefect. What if, on the strength of that decree which he plausibly obtained, no interrogation whatever has yet been attempted by me? For I foresaw what my rivals might suspect, and for that very reason I had entrusted the sacred orders, sealed, to the office of the prefecture. Nor has a conjecture of this kind deceived me: since I am charged with having carried out severely what I am not convicted of having undertaken at all. All these things, attested by the trustworthiness of the official acts, I have appended below, adding only this one request: that your Eternity absolve me from the necessity of this inquiry, the authority for which you ordered to be referred to the records of the palace. For if wicked men were allowed so much against me while the order stood in force, what will not be permitted once the letters have been retracted? Indeed, since the praiseworthy man, the bishop, denies that any of his people are held either in prison or in chains, and since the office that administers the same matter is unaware of it, I do not know precisely whom you would have me release. The laws do, to be sure, hold guilty men accused of various crimes, but, as I have found, men who are strangers to the ministry of the Christian law. What therefore your Eternity may decree, I devotedly await, and I beg that you beat back the deceit which has troubled the repose of your divine breast, which has compelled the care of a venerable prince to the necessity of an edict. Ill will has served as my fortification: for once it has been convicted of falsehood it will hereafter find no place at the sacred ears. If, nevertheless, the muttering of detractors should bring anything forward anew, I welcome a trial: those who cannot prove a man guilty will find me steadfast under an imperial hearing.