Letter 5040: The return to private life after the prefecture has been, I will confess, somewhat more difficult than I anticipated.
The return to private life after the prefecture has been, I will confess, somewhat more difficult than I anticipated. The transition from governing to observing is not one that I have made naturally; I find myself continuing to think in prefectorial terms about problems that are no longer mine to address.
This is, I suppose, the occupational hazard of effective service: it produces habits of thought that do not conveniently switch off when the office ends. I notice the condition of the streets differently now that I am not responsible for them; I notice the state of the food supply and the price of grain in a way that a purely private person would not.
What I am enjoying — genuinely, not as a consolation — is the freedom to read again. The pile of books that accumulated through the prefecture, untouched because there was simply no time, has been engaging my evenings and my early mornings in a way that is actively pleasurable. I had forgotten how much I missed this.
How goes your own reading?
Your friend in the pleasures of private life,
Symmachus
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
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