Letter 1021: Even if I could honor you with letters every single day, I still wouldn't feel I'd done my duty as the situation...
Even if I were able to celebrate your distinction with unbroken letters, I would not seem to myself to be discharging my obligation sufficiently, as the matter demands: so far am I from reproaching you with my own diligence. But just as this befits my modesty, so it belongs to your kindness to sustain our zeal with equal goodwill. Observe whither the sum of my words tends: for a long time now you grant nothing for us to read. "The care of the praetorship," you will say, "has claimed me wholly for itself." It is true: you deservedly attain the highest offices, but great fortune does not burden the very great powers of your talent. Therefore attend also to these matters, which bring no annoyance to men so occupied, in that for the most part they themselves console our annoyances. Farewell.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Ego etsi continais litteris honorem tuum celebrare possem, non satis mihi viderer,
proquam res postulat, fungi debitum meum: tantum abest, ut operam tibi adsiduitatis
exprobrem. sed ut hoc meae verecundiae conpetit, item tuae humanitatis est stu- 5
dium nostrum pari gratia sustinere. animadverte, quo tendat summa verborum meorum :
iamdudum nihil tribuis, quod legamus. totum me, itquies, emancipavit sibi cura
praetorii. verum est: potiris merito summa iudicia, sed maximas ingenii tui vires
fortuna magna non onerat. proinde etiam his rebus adtende, quae ita occupatis nihil
molestiae adferunt, ut ipsas molestias plerumque solentur. vale. 10
XVIin pmi) a. 378.
Revision history
- 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
Our ancestors did well and wisely — as was their way in so many things — when they built the temples of Honor and...
If you have a taste for natural history — the kind Pliny labored over — here are some volumes I happened to have on...
I'd nearly resigned myself to writing you a brief, empty letter — there was nothing worth reporting, and when...
Here's Rusticus, barely freed from his business in Rome.