Letter 10023: I write to you from a Rome that is, in the literal sense, less Roman than the Rome I grew up in; the changes are...
I write to you from a Rome that is, in the literal sense, less Roman than the Rome I grew up in; the changes are visible in the streets and in the composition of the Senate.
The practical question I raise will be clear enough from the text of the letter; I will not repeat it here in the covering note. What I want to say, which would not fit naturally into the official form, is that the matter in question is one on which my judgment is confident even if the official presentation requires more hedging than I would choose.
Please respond at your earliest convenience. The situation will not wait indefinitely for resolution, and a delay that is optional now will become costly if allowed to continue.
More cheerfully: the dinner I owe you has been planned for next month if circumstances cooperate.
Your devoted friend,
Symmachus
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
How fare you this long while? Have you altogether recovered the use of your hand? And how do other things prosper?
Having covered the coast beyond Formiae that stretches toward Axyr, we won't delay the ship and its rowers.
(The division of the civil Province of Cappadocia into two Provinces in the year 372 was followed by ecclesiastical troubles. Anthimus, the Bishop of Tyana, the civil metropolis of the new division of Cappadocia Secunda, maintained that the Ecclesiastical divisions must necessarily follow the civil, and by consequence claimed for himself that th...
(Nicobulus asked Gregory to publish a collection of his letters. Gregory forwards a copy.) You are asking flowers from an autumn meadow, and arming Nestor in his old age, in demanding from me now something clever in the way of language, after I have long neglected all that is enjoyable in language and in life. But yet (since it is not an Eurysth...
I'd owe you rich thanks for greeting me so promptly after my departure, if the hope of a greater favor didn't claim...