Letter 7025: I debated for some time whether to honor you with a letter while properly waiting for your return.

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusAttalus|c. 378 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|From Rome|To Attalus (recipient)|AI-assisted
barbarian invasionfriendshipillness

A long deliberation held me back, as to whether I ought to pay you my respects while a justified expectation of your return was at hand. For I feared that your haste might be broken by comforts met along the way. But the opposite consideration resolved this uncertainty, since it gave hope that this letter would serve, for one returning, as a spur rather than as a bridle. Yet by design I offer you brevity alone, delivering merely a word of greeting, so that the scant draught of my words may be more effective at provoking your thirst than at satisfying it. Farewell.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.

Latin / Greek Original

Longa me deliberatio habuit, an tibi honorem facere sub iusta reditus vestri ex-
pectatione deberem. verebar enim, ne festinatio tna solaciis obviis frangeretur. sed
hoc ambiguum solvit ratio contraria, quae spem dedit, has litteras revertenti stimulo-
15 rum non frenorum instar futuras. ^ed consulto adfecto brevitatem solam tibi deferens
dictionem salutis, ut verborum meorum haustns exiguus efScacior sit ad sollicitandam
sitim quam ad explendam. vale.

xxm.

Revision history

  1. 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import

    Initial corpus import from modern symmachus retranslated v1.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/qaureliisymmach00seecgoog

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