Letter 10076: The grain supply from Africa has been interrupted; I write to report the situation and to request the imperial...

From: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, senator and orator To: [Unknown correspondent] Date: ~398 AD Context: Symmachus, Book X, letter 76; personal correspondence from his long career as a senior senator in the late Roman West. The grain supply from Africa has been interrupted; I write to report the situation and to request the imperial intervention that only the highest authority can provide. 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