Letter 5071: The years have a way of making one's position on certain questions more nuanced than it was in youth, and I want to...

From: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, senator and orator To: [Unknown correspondent] Date: ~396 AD Context: Symmachus, Book V, letter 71. A late letter from the last years of Symmachus's active public life. The years have a way of making one's position on certain questions more nuanced than it was in youth, and I want to share something of this with you because I think you are at an age where the same process is beginning for you and it may be useful to have a companion account. On the question of public service: I spent many years convinced that the highest obligation of a man of my class was service to the state — the prefecture, the senatorial role, the embassies and appointments that constituted a proper cursus honorum [the traditional Roman sequence of public offices]. I still believe this, but I believe it with less of the romantic conviction that animated it early and more of the sober recognition of what it actually costs. What it costs is time that cannot be recovered, health that is expended in the service of others' problems, and a certain quality of interior life that the demands of public office simply do not allow. What it gives is influence, the satisfaction of genuine accomplishment, and the kind of relationships that form between people who have faced difficult situations together. The balance sheet, on reflection, is not simple. But I think it comes out positive. Yours with the benefit of long experience, Symmachus