Letter 3039: The days pass in a relentless sequence of formal obligations, each one demanding exactly the attention that the...
The days pass in a relentless sequence of formal obligations, each one demanding exactly the attention that the previous one has already exhausted. This is what it means to hold the prefecture: you discover that governance, at the level where it meets actual human beings with actual problems, is mostly an exercise in attending to an unending stream of problems that are individually solvable but collectively impossible to stay ahead of.
And yet: I would not give it up. There is something about the work that satisfies in a way that purely private life does not, and I think I have been honest enough with myself to admit this. The city has never been governed exactly as I govern it — no one governs exactly as anyone else governs — and that particularity matters to me.
What I lack is time to write. The letters I owe are accumulating; the readings I have planned are gathering dust; the friends who deserve better than silence are receiving exactly silence. Write to me and remind me that I exist outside the Prefecture.
Yours in the midst of business,
Symmachus
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
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