Letter 5038: You gave me more than I asked for.
You gave me more than I asked for. When I requested your help in finding chariot horses for the games, you added four complete teams free of charge, swelling the number I'd already purchased. Of those horses, eleven survivors were brought safely by the escort; the rest, unfortunately, didn't last much beyond the handover.
But fortune doesn't diminish my gratitude for your generosity — when friends give gifts, we shouldn't dwell on chance losses. What matters is the total that left the giver's hand.
I've sent you a candidate's commemorative diptych [an ivory writing tablet given as a souvenir] and a gift of two pounds of silver, to show that you were absent from our games in body only, not in spirit.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
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