Letters 67–79

[Letter 66] I have chosen to put a question to you about a man who, being of a Cyrenean council family, while still a youth was initiated into the monastic life. As the earnestness of his monastic life advanced with his age, he was deemed worthy of the church's ministry, and deemed worthy of being a presbyter. Having come to the court on some business, and having been introduced to the blessed John (for let the memory of the departed be honoured by us, since all enmity is laid aside with this life), introduced to him, I say, before the churches were divided by faction, he was appointed by his hands bishop of Basinopolis in Bithynia. When the dispute arose, he remained a friend of the one who had ordained him and became one of his partisans. But when the synodal decision … Why should I narrate to one who knows, or rather who himself managed, the business of the reconciliations that took place? For I also read a wise book which you wrote, I think, to the blessed Atticus, urging him to receive these men. Up to this point Alexander's case is common to his fellow seceders. Peculiar to him, or shared with few, is this: it is now the third year since the amnesty and the reconciliations, and he has not gone straight to Bithynia, nor taken up the see allotted to him, but stays among us, as if it made no difference to him even if someone treats him as a layman. Now I was not brought up from early on in the sacred laws, nor is it to be expected that I should have learned much, since last year I was not yet on the roll of the clergy. But I perceived that some of the elders, who did not themselves claim to know anything clearly, had taken fright lest they unwittingly offend against some canon of the Church, and for this reason, on an unclear suspicion, had poured clear dishonour on the stranger; they would not even share a roof with him. I neither blamed them nor imitated them. Do you know what I did, most revered Father? I did not receive him in church, nor did I share the sacred table with him; but at home I honoured him equally with those who are blameless, which is my way also with the local people. Whenever one of them becomes my guest, we give way to him in every deed and word that carries honour, thinking those who are vexed to be talking nonsense when they say that we are throwing away the city's maternal rights. Yet for this reason I carry the cares of all upon my shoulders, and alone am busy for the leisure of all. But it will stand me in good stead before God to have the larger share of toils and the smaller share of honours. As for this Alexander, when I go out to church I would wish not to see him anywhere in the market-place; and if I happen to see him, I turn my eyes somewhere else, and at once a blush blooms on my cheek. But when he has crossed into my own courtyard and come under my roof, I honour him with every fitting attention. Why, then, am I at odds with myself in private and in public, doing in neither case what I have resolved? But in the one I yield to the law, in the other I indulge nature; [and I would not indulge] nature, if I knew anything clear about the law. This, then, is the very question to which the authority of the evangelical succession must answer simply and clearly, just as I ask it: must Alexander be considered a bishop, or not?

[Letter 67] To the same. I both wish, and am under divine necessity, to consider as law whatever that throne decrees. For this reason I excused myself from an occupation of mourning, forced a body still under care to its labours, and, traversing as if it were safe the dangerous country which enemy arms had walled off, I came to Palaebisca and Hydrax. These are villages of the Pentapolis, on the very borders of thirsty Libya. There I assembled the people, read some letters and delivered others (some were addressed to them, others to me concerning them), and went through arguments suited to an election, to persuade them and, if it went forward, to compel them to take up the question of a bishop; but I did not overcome the people's zeal for the most pious Paul. I ask to be believed by a father: it was not my wish to have run in vain. Though they honour me highly, I offended the people in many ways. The most conspicuous of them, if anyone shouted louder, if anyone found a platform, climbed on it, claimed to be spokesman, and drew out a speech, I handed over to the attendants' hands as bribed men, as conspirators, and ordered them to be thrust out and bundled out of the church. When the people were thrown into confusion, I took them in hand and calmed them again and again, and went down every road of argument, magnifying that archiepiscopal throne and persuading them that through slighting and honouring you, God himself is slighted and honoured. But they invoked the blessed name of your piety with reverent voice, and falling down they made supplication, uttering their cries and laments as to one present. The men's part, though beyond expectation, was the lesser; but the women, a thing hard to deal with, raising their hands, holding out their infants, and closing their eyes so as not to gaze on a throne bereft of its accustomed protector, very nearly drove us, who were acting against them, into a like passion … we heard from those present that he was installed neither at Alexandria nor by three bishops here, nor whether the token of ordination had been given from there. For they say that only the blessed Philo dared to proclaim a fellow-priest. Philo of Cyrene was the elder, the uncle and namesake of the younger; in other respects he was such as a disciple of Christ might be, but in ruling and being ruled he was more bold than law-abiding. … and it became known in the city. For it so happened that nearly all the bishops had then gathered at Ptolemais for some civic deliberation. When they heard of it, they hated the act but shrank from reversing it.

I think it right to distinguish superstition from piety; for superstition is vice wearing the mask of virtue, which philosophy has detected as the third form of godlessness. So I have not considered anything sacred or holy that was not done justly and holily. Accordingly it did not occur to me to shudder at the so-called consecration. For the things of Christians are not such that the divine must of necessity follow the initiatory materials and words, as though drawn by natural attractions (which is what might happen to a spirit within the cosmos), but such that it is present in dispositions free from passion and akin to God. Where anger and senseless wrath and contentious passion lead the action, how is the Holy Spirit present there, which is driven out when these come in, even if it happened to dwell there before? I was ready, then, to declare the consecration annulled. But he [Paul] was being refuted, and having earlier promised … the promised declaration under oath …; and I appointed him judge of himself, and when he set out his own boundary, since I had come there for the purpose of an ecclesiastical inquiry, it was necessary to look over the place and examine the facts of the case further. And again a company of bishops from the neighbouring district was present, gathered for various needs. Before them all, and me, the boundary-stones were pointed out, clearly cutting off the portion of the Dardanites, and the testimony of elders and the consent of those who had till then disputed it declared the most pious Dioscorus owner of the property. Since brother Dioscorus pressed for it, it became necessary also to read out to all in common the insulting document which the most pious Paul had composed to your holiness, a comedy in the form of a letter, unrestrained and offensive, against the brother; from it shame came not to the one ill spoken of but to the one who spoke ill. But this too, it seems, is a second good: to feel shame. For to be without sin belongs plainly to a divine lot and nature; but a blush at what was not well done one would declare a mark of self-control. Undergoing this in the present affair, he showed a repentance that came from his own judgment. For by confessing that he had sinned, and by being seen to grieve with a shamed grief as for evils freely chosen, he made us all well-disposed to him and sympathetic. Our part is nothing to wonder at; but the most pious bishop Dioscorus, when he saw the man who had been contending so hotly humbled, prevailed by the vote but was overcome in his mind, and it was left to the most pious Paul to do whichever he wished, to keep or to give up the hill, the admirable Dioscorus offering many choices, none of which Paul would have endured to hear before his repentance. For he proposed selling the hill alone, or giving the whole estate together in exchange, and found many other ways besides, lavishly providing means by which one might be won over. Paul shrank from these, but asked to step into the purchase made by brother Dioscorus and, on the same terms, to become owner of the property in his place. So, besides the hill, he became master of the vineyards and the olive groves. To Dioscorus, his magnanimity has come as property for property, a greater for a lesser; common to both is the good of brotherly love, and their having come within the laws of the gospel, which declared the disposition of love the most binding of the commandments. This one thing alone ought to have been thought worth recording: to report the agreements and the concord of the brothers, and to leave out what came between, if a bishop was caught in some stumble; for what ought not to have been done is well given over to forgetfulness. But so that brother Dioscorus might not fail in every respect, I yielded to his requests to go through everything exactly, so that your piety might be ignorant of nothing; for he counted it not a trifle but everything to persuade you, through the outcome, that he did not contend for unjust ends. And I praise the man in other respects too, for he is very much to my liking, and I greatly admire his reverence toward that throne. And yes, by your dear and venerable head, I think that the poor in Alexandria owe him great thanks, whose fields he works, being quickly everywhere, collecting revenues where there seemed no means, and standing by at critical moments. So went the matter of the dispute between the bishops.

They reap honours by roaming about where … it is more profitable. It seems to me, most revered father, that those who have renounced their own churches should be refused by every church; and until they go back and settle there, no one should receive them at the altar nor call them to the seat of honour, but should overlook them as men of the crowd in the people's seats, whenever they come into church. For they would quickly return if they ran a risk concerning the honour which they think fit to enjoy anywhere rather than where it belongs; for they would accept it there rather than nowhere. In public, then, they should be treated plainly as laymen, if your most venerable throne also agrees. In private and at home, we shall know how, when the answer comes from your piety to that question which I first asked about Alexander, a man Cyrenean by birth, who served as priest in a city of the Bithynians; having been driven out of it in some faction, though he is free to return, he does not return, but lives among us. About him I wrote to your holiness, going through exactly everything that had happened concerning him, and asking for a decision on where the man is to be ranked. But since no reply has come to me about this, being in doubt whether the letter miscarried or was delivered to your blessed head, I have spoken about it with the admirable bishop Dioscorus, and ordered the shorthand-writers to give him copies of what was then written, so that if you happen not to have received the letter, you may read the copy, ask, and send me the answer. Above all, pray for me; for you will be praying for one abandoned and deserted by all, and in need of such help that I shrink from uttering the prayers for myself to God. For everything turns out the opposite for me, because of my reckless daring, in that I, a man in sin, laid hands on the altars of God, …

The man to whom I have given this letter is setting out on a business which it is not holy for me to describe. But that virtue …

For you care, you care for the Pentapolis too. You will read the public letters. But that the evils have become more and greater than the letters lead you to fear, you will hear from the bearer, who will tell you. For he is being sent to ask for military aid from there. But the enemy did not even wait for his departure; they poured over the country in a mass before he could go. Everything is lost, everything destroyed. The cities still remain, up to the moment I write, they remain; as for tomorrow, God knows. Against all this your prayers are needed, your accustomed prayers, I mean, to move God. For I have prayed many times already, both for my own affairs and for the common ones, in vain. Why do I say in vain? It has turned out the opposite for me. So heavy and so many are my sins.

Last year no letter came to me from your sacred hand. I counted this too among the hardships that befell me at that time. For I was grieved by many things last year; and this year's winter took away what was left me for my comfort, my child. It was fated, it seems, that while I was with you I should be fortunate, and when I was away, I should experience a harsh fortune. Let there be some consolation, then: to receive letters from your fatherly head, the most precious of the goods that come from Thrace.

Two stories are told about you. Therefore I am writing both to Thrace and to Isauria, so as to reach you at any rate with one of the letters. The purpose of both is to greet a dearest head, Pylaemenes the philosopher. For that is what he is, whether he wishes it or not. For bad training will never overpower nature, nor will it quench the spark of the divine fire; he will kindle it one day, once he has risen above his wretched upbringing.

… let him experience the same. Recently, very recently, … he sinned against God and committed outrage against men; … for which we shut the church here against him and dictated letters to your brotherhood announcing our judgment upon him. He forestalled their dispatch by feigning supplication and promising repentance, which all thought I should accept, except me. For I thought I had clearly understood the man, for whom it is easy to say and do anything; and I expected, and said beforehand, that on any pretext that came along he would go back to his nature, though it was likely that he would be less daring once he had bowed before the churches than if nothing were left to make him suspect. For these reasons I was ready to hold to my resolution, as having taken counsel both more piously toward God and more usefully for the citizens. But it is rash for one man to resist many, a younger man his elders, one who last year had not yet touched the office men who had spent their lives in the priesthood. I yielded to their requests, not to send round the letters yet, but to receive him on stated terms: that he would no longer rage against men of his own rank, and that he would set reason instead of passion over his life. 'And if', I said, 'you stay within the bounds you have set yourself, we shall now pray for your sin, and from now on pray with you; but if you go back on the terms of your confession, the sentence remains, … enough to prove your character incorrigible.' This was agreed; he said he would give proof of himself, and that we should have it. He has given it, and we have had it. He has furnished abundant grounds for the sentence of excommunication. At that time confiscation had not yet been dared; at that time murder had not yet been attempted. How many are vagrants because of these things? How many of those formerly men of property are beggars because of this man? But these are small things compared with Magnus, well born and wretchedly destroyed. There lies the son of a most illustrious man, who had performed every public service for the city with all he had, a casualty of envy aimed at another. Gold was demanded of him; when he did not give it, he was beaten; and when he gave it, he was beaten because he had found the means. Why? Because he sold his field not to his tormentor's friends but to the general. I weep for the youth so lawlessly treated, and for the vain hopes the city had in him. But more pitiable than his youth is his mother's old age, because of her two sons … one is gone, an exile because of Andronicus, and she does not even know in what land he is; the other she knows in what land she has buried him. Alas for the laws, wronged along with us, against which men govern their own native province, against which they borrow money to obtain office! God wills that others should have charge of these things; for us it is enough to keep pure among the pure, if we can remain within the sacred precincts, and to shut the most holy things against the accursed.

For you are both a philosopher and a lover of mankind. To you I must lament the misfortunes of my native land, which you will honour for the sake of a philosopher who is its citizen, and pity because of the gentleness of your own nature; and for both reasons you will try to raise it from its fall. And you can, since Anthemius has the nature, the fortune, and the skill to save cities; and of the many means God has given him for this, the greatest good is his friends, and of these Troilus is the greatest. See to it, then, that you not only cast your eyes over this letter, but apply your mind to it very earnestly; I shed many tears over it. For why is it that Phoenicians do not govern Phoenicians, nor Coele-Syrians Coele-Syria, and Egyptians govern any province rather than their own, but Libyans alone govern their own? Or are the Libyans alone the bravest of men, resolved to come to close quarters with the laws? Yet when the penalties for transgressors of the laws became more numerous and more fearful, then all the more did wicked natures grow bold against them. The Pentapolis near Cyrene was bound, it seems, to be destroyed utterly; and famine and war have not yet accomplished all that was required, but they linger and destroy us little by little. So we have found in addition the means of finishing off quickly what is left. And yet this is what … of the city: we heard it from our fathers and grandfathers, that the wickedness of the governors would destroy the Libyans' state. This is the very fragment of the oracle. But if this too is fated, contrive some delay of the evil. For the art of physicians does not altogether prevent a man from dying, since that is nature; but it creates some delay for fate. We ask something similar of the art of government: let it help nature against the disease, and not hasten the destruction. Let it not, I beg, let it not happen in the times of the great Anthemius that a Roman province is removed from the middle of the empire's administration. Say to him, say, by the god of eloquence: were you not the cause of the law being sent down, a recent one on top of the old ones, which threatens many harsh penalties against those who court the governorship of their native land? How, then, are you not indignant with those who are ambitious to break your enactments in your own time? If they do not escape your notice, you do wrong; if they do escape it, you are negligent. It ought not to be so. … the man most fit to govern; but to attend above all to this one thing: to choose as governors the best men available. For this is a divine and magnificent providence, on which care is spent in the selection of a good man; for in this, care is taken of a whole nation. These men, then, who leap upon the laws, should be rejected at once: against the laws they govern their own province; against the laws they borrow money on us, as on property. Appoint men who do not know us and whom we do not know, who judge affairs by their nature, not by their feelings toward each person. As things are now, a former political opponent sails in as master, and fights out from the tribunal his quarrel from civic life. And what other evils sprout up beside! Dinner parties are made the subject of false charges; a citizen's ruin is given as a favour to a woman; the accuser acts under orders; and whoever does not bring a charge of illegality is himself convicted, if indeed he has not suffered the lot of the convicted even before conviction. We saw a man put in chains by him, because he would not prosecute for theft of public funds the man who had just laid down a most excellent governorship. Or rather we did not even see him, for access to him was forbidden, as to the accursed or the emperor's enemies, until they had accomplished all they wished; and the man saw the sun again on terms, on condition that he indicted Gennadius. Yet our Pentapolis profited much from Gennadius the Syrian, in many ways; and the greatest is that by word and persuasion … he brought more money into the public treasury than those most notorious for harshness. Over it no one wept, for it no one sold his field. That contribution one could justly call pious, which no insult or whip compelled. But as for the citizens' present state, alas for the memory of those who have gone, alas for the experience of those we now see! We ask, then, for nothing new: we supplicate Anthemius on behalf of the laws, the guardian of the laws on their behalf, whose antiquity it is right to respect, for this too is part of the majesty of law; or, if anyone prefers, on behalf of the newer decrees, which bear the name, so to say, of a reign still living.

I have sent you the speech, of Attic make and exact workmanship. If Pylaemenes, the most critical of ears, praises it, this very fact [will commend it] to the succession of time …

That famous epigram of yours: how could I not know it? 'The image of golden Cypris, or of Stratonice.' You surely know that it was adapted by me at the time for my sister too, having learned it from the verse. This dearest of my sisters, whom I honoured with both the image and the verse, has as her husband Theodosius, a guardsman of the emperor, who by reason of his years and his service in the army would long ago have been promoted; but zeal counts for more than years. Be of help to him in this, then, and in any lawsuits he may have before Anthemius; and let him profit somewhat from the great Nican[der] …

The Olbiatae (they are a village community) needed to elect a bishop, since the most blessed father Athamas had brought his priesthood to an end together with his long life. They called me in to share in the deliberation. I rejoiced with men who were making their choice among many, and all of them good; but I rejoiced much more with Antonius for his nobility, in that he was judged finer than the fine; for the vote of the whole people went to him. Two most pious bishops also added their judgment to that of the multitude: he had been brought up with them, and by the hand of one of them he had been made presbyter. I myself was not wholly unacquainted with Antonius, but praised him for as many words and deeds as I knew him by; and adding to the good things I knew what I had heard, I too bring my vote for the man. And I would gladly receive him as a partner in the priesthood of equal rank. One thing, then, is still needed, the most decisive: your sacred hand. The Olbiatae need this; I need your prayers.

Light and darkness will not wait for each other, but alternate by a law of nature. On returning from escorting you, Andronicus …

[Letter 78] To the same. Nothing could be more profitable to the Pentapolis than that the Unnigardae, good men and good soldiers, should be preferred to all soldiers: not only to those called native, but also to all who have ever come to these parts as allies. For those never ventured with confidence to engage a smaller number of the enemy, though they were many times more numerous; but these, only forty, with God and you as general, have now two and three times drawn up against men numbering over a thousand, and have won the greatest and finest victories. Of the barbarians who came within their sight they destroyed some and drove off others, and they still range over the high ground of the country and guard the enemy's points of invasion, like yard dogs that have leapt out in front so that no wild beast may spring upon the flock. But we are ashamed to see the champions weeping in the very sweat they shed for us. For what they have written to us I did not hear read without emotion; and I ask you too not to overlook their supplication. They ask of you through us, and of the emperor through you, a request which it would have been fitting for us to make even if they were silent: that the men should not be enrolled in the local units. For they would become useless to themselves and to us, deprived of the imperial gifts, if they have neither remounts of horses, nor supply of arms, nor pay sufficient for fighting men. Do not, you who are a champion together with them, overlook the soldiers being put into a less honoured rank; but let them remain secure in their privileges, firmly in their former dignity. This would happen if through your report our most humane emperor learned how great a benefit they have been to the Pentapolis. And ask the emperor on our behalf, in your own letter, a further request: that a hundred and sixty men be added to these forty. With God, who would not declare that two hundred Unnigardae, like these in spirit and in hand (and we praise not least the gentleness of their temper), would … with you as general the Ausurian war? And what need is there of many enlistment rolls, and of the yearly expense paid to the soldiers here? War needs hands, not many names.

I have been of no use to Evagrius the presbyter, nor indeed to any other of those who are wronged. For Andronicus of Berenice governs among us, an abominable man, with a murderous mind and tongue. If he despises me, it is no matter; but he seems to me to … the things of God as well … to weep on me, and each to lament his own lot … of evils, because of whom I cannot enjoy, even out of season, the leisure that has been my companion from youth. But I, who am of no use to anyone, must put up with everyone coming to me and exposing our weakness. Therefore I beg, very earnestly I beg both of you, but especially you, my dear head, brother Anastasius (for you have the reputation of protecting a raving man): if you have any power (and you would be more just in using it for Synesius than for Andronicus), free Ptolemais from its dejection, the city allotted to me not by my own wish, as God's all-seeing eye knows. I do not know for what I am paying such penalties; 'and if we were hateful to any of the gods before,' he says, 'we have been punished enough.' But it is right to say this also on behalf of Maximinus and Clinias, whom, it seems to me, even the cruellest of spirits would have pitied. Let Thoas and Andronicus be excepted from the saying, the only implacable spirits …

I was ready to place both hand and mind at the service of your fatherly command. But Ampelius did not, I think, take better thought for his own advantage than Nicaeus did for how he might be estranged from his own property. For I do not know well on what terms he left before, nor on what terms he came back, nor why he is going abroad again. How could I, when I neither saw him nor was anything clear reported about him? Someone else brought the letter from your sacred hand and asked for this one in reply, as Nicaeus had already loosed his stern-cable. And it is not that I did not see him while the governor saw or heard him; he too neither saw nor heard him. How, then, can one win for Nicaeus, when he is abroad, living on a farm? Yet in return he has many good things, all that the seasons bring to farmers; and he would have more, if he had also got possession of his mother's estate.