Letter 7019: Item ad Flavum et Euodium

Venantius FortunatusFlavus|c. 586 AD|Venantius Fortunatus|To Flavus (recipient)|AI-assisted
friendship

19
Likewise, to Flavus and Euodius

How well they accord, whom one father brought up,
if a single heart holds them both at once!
Flavus and Euodius, begotten of the same flesh,
our own flesh enfolds them utterly in one love.
The one is held by my gaze in the looking upon the other,
and the likeness of the one brother gave the appearance of the other brother.
From the face of the one the face of the second is known to me:
so a form, mirrored back, renders one like to its match.
Therefore, with equal prayer offering vows of well-being to the equal pair,
I shall be a third one between the two of them:
desiring this, that those whom one same love holds in dear embraces,
three of them, this letter too may bind us together.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

XIX
Item ad Flavum et Euodium
Quam bene conveniunt genitor quos sustulit unus,
si simul hos unum pectus utrosque tenet!
visceribus hisdem genitos Flavum Euodiumque
prorsus amore uno viscera nostra tegunt.
alter in alterius mihi visu visus habetur,
et fratris speciem fratris imago dedit.
unius ex facie facies mihi nota secundi:
sic speculo similem forma repressa refert.
ergo pari voto paribus dans vota salutis
ambos inter ego tertius alter ero:
hoc cupiens, ut quos caris amplexibus idem
tres amor unus habet, nos quoque Charta liget.

Revision history

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

    Initial corpus import from modern venantius fortunatus retranslated v1.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://data.mgh.de/openmgh/bsb00000790.zip

Related Letters