Letter 8018: My son is out of danger, thank God, but he's suffering from a weakness that borders on illness.
My son is out of danger, thank God, but he's suffering from a weakness that borders on illness. The plan is to travel home by easy stages, breaking the journey into shorter stretches. I, too, have been struck down in sympathy -- probably from the sleepless nights of nursing, whose effects were mild at the time but flared up afterward.
I'm doing my best to suppress the advancing sickness with careful diet and restraint. So with heaven invoked, we're preparing to set out. I'd properly thank your devoted concern for us, but love that is hoped for and tested by experience doesn't need words to confirm it. Farewell.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
This letter spans several pages and is heavily interspersed with critical apparatus.
Had you been for a long time considering how best you could reply to my letter about yours, you could not in my judgment have acquitted yourself better than by writing as you have written now. You call me a sophist, and you allege that it is a sophist's business to make small things great and great things small. And you maintain that the object ...
You may conjecture from what it contains, what pleasure you have given me by your letter. The pureness of heart, from which such expressions sprang, was plainly signified by what you wrote. A streamlet tells of its own spring, and so the manner of speech marks the heart from which it came.
This is a lengthy letter substantially corrupted by OCR artifacts and interwoven editorial apparatus.
SYMMACHUS TO AUSONIUS: