Letter 3045: The news from the East has been, to put it gently, unsettling.

From: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, senator and orator To: [Unknown correspondent] Date: ~387 AD Context: Symmachus, Book III, letter 45. A letter on the affairs of the Roman aristocracy and the social world that Symmachus inhabited. The news from the East has been, to put it gently, unsettling. Not the military situation, which has its own trajectory and which I am not in a position to influence, but the implications for the social arrangements that those of us who have invested in the stability of those arrangements have grown to depend on. I do not say this to alarm you — you have your own sources of information and your own assessment of the situation. I say it because you are one of the few people with whom I can speak about these matters with the confidence that what I say will be received as the honestly stated concern of a man of good faith rather than the complaint of someone looking for an audience for his anxieties. The life we have built — the villas, the libraries, the networks of friendship and obligation, the literary culture that is, I think, genuinely valuable and not merely self-indulgent — is more fragile than we like to think. The events of recent years have made this clear. What is not clear is what one does about it. I continue to do what I do: correspond, read, write, attend to the city. It is probably the right response. Your friend in continued uncertainty, Symmachus