Letter 2068: My written recommendation carries little weight if my friend Leontius is not commended by his own blameless life and...

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusVirius Nicomachus Flavianus|c. 395 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|From Rome|To Rome|AI-assisted
friendship

The commendation of my writings counts for little, if it is an innocent life [...] that wins favor for my friend Leontius. Endowed therefore with his own merit, he does not require the props of a commendation; and yet I ought not to refrain from this sort of letter, more to satisfy friendship than to confer any help upon him. You, however, in keeping with the esteem in which you are distinguished, see to it that he knows the gratitude owed to him has been doubled in my name as well. 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AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

Parva est commendatio scriptorum meorum , si Leontium familiarem meum inno-

cens vita j^pyiia qiijfrpfiqni^ conciliat. suo igitur praeditus merito commendationis ad-

t5 minicnla non requirit, et tamen abstinere non debeo tali genere litterarum, magis ut

amicitiae satisfaciam, quam ut ei aliquid opis conferam. tu tamen pro dignatione,

qua clarus es, facito noverit, gratiam sui meo quoque nomine esse geminatam. vale.

LXVm (LXVH) ante a. 395.

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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