Letter 1084: I believe the distinguished Vitalianus asked me for this letter more as a courtesy to me than as any real help to...

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusUnknown|c. 399 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|AI-assisted
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I believe that Vitalianus, a most distinguished man, requested a letter from me for the sake of my own duty rather than as a help to himself. For since nothing further can be added to him toward earning your love, this alone seems to have been accomplished: that from this service a more abundant reconciliation of you to me might come about. Receive, then, this hastily sketched greeting; and if you reply to it with more ample eloquence, you will be provoking the leanness of my talent as a model for your own abundance.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

Vitaliannm clarissimnm yiram, mei potius officii gratia qnam in adinmentum snnm
credo litteras poposcisse. nam cnm ipsi ad promerendum tnum amorem nihil ultra
possit accedere, id tantum videtur egisse, nt mihi ex hoc mnnere conciliatio tni nbe-
rior proyeniret. cape igitnr delibatam cnrsim salutationem , cui si facnndia largiore
responderis, in exemplum copiae ingenii mei maciem provocabis. 25

LXXXn (LXXVI).

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

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