Letter 10022: The restoration of the Altar of Victory [the famous pagan altar in the Senate House, removed by Gratian in 382 and...
The restoration of the Altar of Victory [the famous pagan altar in the Senate House, removed by Gratian in 382 and never restored despite Symmachus's famous petition] remains, for me, a matter of principle as much as of sentiment.
The formal part of this letter is straightforward; the personal part is what I actually wanted to say when I sat down to write. The formal part will reach you first.
I find myself, in this season, more conscious than usual of the ways in which we accommodate ourselves to circumstances that we would not have chosen. This is not complaint — or it is complaint in the mode of a man who has learned that complaint without remedy is simply bad style. It is observation. The Rome of our fathers, and certainly the Rome of their fathers, was organized in ways that permitted a different kind of public life than the one we navigate.
We navigate what we have. I intend to continue navigating it as well as my abilities allow.
Your friend and colleague,
Symmachus
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
I wish I could report that my son's illness has passed.
I repay everyone who gives me an occasion to write with the currency of a recommendation.
This is a long letter whose text is substantially intermixed with critical apparatus and OCR artifacts.
The anger that comes from injustice cuts deep, but the medicine of patience should soften the pain.
A certain sense of propriety held me back from writing first.