Letter 1015: You ask me for longer letters.

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusDecimus Magnus Ausonius|c. 372 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|From Rome|To Bordeaux|AI-assisted
education booksfriendship

You ask longer letters of me. This is a token of true affection toward us. But I, who am conscious of my own poor talent, prefer to cultivate Laconic [Spartan] brevity rather than publish the leanness of my own dullness over many-paged sheets. Nor is it any wonder if the vein of our eloquence has been thinned, which long since neither any poem of yours nor [...] of prose volumes [...]

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.

Latin / Greek Original

Petis a me litteras longiores. est hoc in nos veri amoris indicium. sed ego qui

sim paupertini ingenii mei conscius, Laconicae malo studere brevitati quam multi-

ingis paginis infantiae meae maciem publicare. nec mirum, si eloquii nostri vena

30 tenuata est, quam dudum neque ullius poematis tui neque pedestrium voluminum

Revision history

  1. 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import

    Initial corpus import from modern symmachus retranslated v1.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/qaureliisymmach00seecgoog

Related Letters