Letter 10046: The matter of the candidate you recommended has been handled as you wished, though not without some difficulty that...
The matter of the candidate you recommended has been handled as you wished, though not without some difficulty that I will explain when we meet.
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
Marcella had asked Jerome to lend her a copy of a commentary by Rhetitius, bishop of Augustodunum (Autun), on the Song of Songs. He now refuses to do so on the ground that the work abounds with errors, of which the two following are samples: (1) Rhetitius identifies Tharshish with Tarsus, and (2) he supposes that Uphaz (in the phrase gold of Uph...
...to bite back with retaliation, but I never repay a friend's negligence with equal contempt.
I owe this Sopater a debt from an old kindness.
Orion became my friend when he was prosperous.
I recommended the son of the distinguished Macedonius to you some time ago, when he first entered your court.