Letters

I have begotten speeches as my children: some from most venerable philosophy and from poetry, which shares her temple; others from popular rhetoric. Yet one could recognize that they are all of one father, who inclines now to seriousness, now to pleasure. To which side this present speech belongs, it will itself declare from what it professes. But I loved it so exceptionally that I would most gladly adopt it into philosophy and enrol it among the legitimate children. This, however, they say will not be permitted, not even by the laws of the commonwealth; for the guardians of good birth are formidable. Still, there is gain in whatever I grant it in secret; and I have brought much from the serious side into it. If, then, you too think well of it, share the speech with the Greeks; but if it is voted down, let it come back to the one who sent it. For they say that she-apes, when they have given birth, gaze at their babies as at statues, admiring their beauty, so fond of its own offspring is nature; but the young of others they see for what they are, the children of apes. Others, then, must be allowed to examine one's offspring, for goodwill is apt to corrupt the votes. That is why Lysippus brought in Apelles to judge his works, and Apelles Lysippus to judge his paintings.

The greatest freedom from fear is to fear the laws. But you were always ashamed to be seen fearing them. Therefore fear your enemies, and with them the judges, if they do not steal; and even if they do steal, unless you are the one who gives more, you must be no less on your guard. For they grow angry on behalf of the laws, …

It was the third day that Aeschines had lain dead, and his niece then came to the tomb for the first time; for it is not customary, I think, for brides to go to a funeral. Yet even then she was in crimson, with a transparent hair-net, and hung about with gold and stones … she lay, so that it might not become an ill-omen for the bridegroom … Sitting, then, on … … … in his own life … but on behalf of good birth … the granddaughter of Cecrops her uncle Herodes, a doorkeeper too, sold off to men named Sosias and Tibius. Unless they say something … whence also the bridegroom for us of the famous Lais. For 'Lais', someone has already said, '… bought from Sicily', whence came the mother of fair children, the far-famed one. She herself was long ago the concubine of a shipowner who was her master; then of a rhetor, and he too a master, the third after those, a fellow slave; first secretly to the city, then openly to the city; and she presided over the trade. Since she gave up the practice of it under a slack wrinkle, she trains the girls in their prime and sets them up for the strangers. For her son the rhetor says he is released from the compulsion of the law to support a mother who is a courtesan. Away with such law! For with those born in this way the mother is proven, but the other parent is disputed. Whatever, then, the well-born owe to both parents, all of it should come from the fatherless to their mothers.

Having cast off from Bendideum before the twilight of dawn, we barely passed the Pharian Myrmex after midday, the ship having grounded two or three times on the floor of the harbour. At once this too seemed a bad omen, and it would have been wise to leave a ship whose very first start was unlucky. But we were ashamed to incur among you the charge of cowardice, and for that reason 'it was no longer possible to shrink back or to withdraw'; so that if anything happens, it is because of you that we shall perish. And yet what harm would there have been in your laughing and our standing out of danger? But as they say of Epimetheus, 'to take thought was not his, but to regret was in him'; so with us. For then it was possible to be saved; now on desolate shores we lament in chorus, looking toward Alexandria as far as we can, and toward our mother Cyrene: the one we left though we had it, the other we cannot reach, having seen and suffered things we did not hope for even in a dream. Listen, then, so that you may not have too much leisure for rejoicing; and first, how matters stood with our crew. The shipowner was longing to die because of … [lost in the scan] …

'… [why do] you suspect both the land and the sea?' 'Not if one uses them well, my good Amarantus,' I said to him. 'We had no need even of Taphosiris; for we had to live; and now what need is there of the open sea? Let us sail', I said, 'straight for the Pentapolis, keeping off the land a moderate distance, so that if anything hard should happen (as is the way of the sea, which is uncertain, as it surely is and as is said among you too), some harbour may receive us from close at hand.' I did not persuade him by saying this; the scoundrel had made himself deaf, until a strong north wind struck, driving a high and rough sea. Falling on us suddenly, it drove the sail backward and turned its bulges hollow, and the ship came near to being upended by the stern. With difficulty we righted her, and the deep-groaning Amarantus said, 'This is what it is to sail by art! For I had long been expecting the wind from the open sea, and therefore I was sailing far out. For now we can run across the wind, since the open water gives us room to yield to the swell. Such a course as ours would not have been possible if we had been sailing along the shore; for we would have been dashed against the land.' And we accepted what he said, as long as it was day and the dangers had not yet come. For they began with the night, the surge growing ever greater.

It was the day which the Jews keep as the Preparation; and they reckon the night with the following day, on which it is not lawful for anyone to have his hand at work, but honouring it exceptionally they keep it in idleness. So the helmsman let the rudder go out of his hands, once he guessed that the sun had left the earth, and, throwing himself down, let any sailor who wished trample on him. We at first did not grasp the real cause; thinking it despair, we [begged him not to abandon] the last hopes. For indeed the great waves were bearing down, the sea being at strife even with itself. This happens when the waves do not fall still together with the wind that has ceased, but, still having a strong impulse of motion, meet head-on … For I need even inflamed words, so as not to narrate great evils too meanly. Those who sail in such conditions, they say, have their life hanging by a slender thread. But if the helmsman is also a teacher of the law, what spirit must one have? When we understood the meaning of his abandoning the rudder (for when we begged him to save the ship by what means he had, he kept reading his book), giving up on persuasion, we now applied compulsion; and one soldier … threatened to cut off the fellow's head unless he took hold of the vessel. But he, a very Maccabee, was ready to persist in his doctrine. When it was already midnight, he is persuaded by himself to take his seat at the helm. 'For now', he says, 'the law permits it, since now we are clearly running for our life.' At this a tumult arises afresh, men groaning, women [shrieking] … as though about to write off his creditors at once. As for me, in the midst of the terrors (I swear to you by the God whom philosophy reveres), that Homeric saying troubled me, lest it be true that death by water is the destruction of the soul itself. For he says somewhere in his verses, 'and Ajax utterly perished, when he had drunk the salt water', counting death at sea the most complete destruction. At any rate he says that no one else 'utterly perished', but each one, dying, 'went down to Hades'. That is why in both the descents to the dead the lesser Ajax nowhere appears in the drama, as though his soul were not in Hades; and Achilles, a man most stout-hearted and most fond of danger, shrinks from death in water, which he even calls 'miserable'. Turning over these reasonings, I see the soldiers [with drawn swords]; I learned from them that it was good, while still on deck, to breathe out one's soul into the air, and not into a wave with open mouth. These I considered genuine Homerids, and I joined their doctrine. Then someone proclaims that those who have gold should hang it on themselves; and those who had it hung on themselves gold and whatever was worth gold. And the women adorned themselves, and [gave cords] to the others … to do this; but it has this meaning: the corpse from a shipwreck must carry the price of its burial. For he who [finds it] … would not [grudge] a small part to the one who has given him many times more. They were busy with these things. … I wept for the deposit of my host. As the god of hospitality knows, it was not whether I should die, but whether the Thracian would be robbed, that troubled me, for the sake of the money; before him I would have been ashamed even in death. Here indeed to perish utterly would have been a gain: to perish with the rest, and to escape all awareness. …

What brought the danger close was nothing other than that the ship was being carried under full sail, and it was not possible to shorten sail. But though we often attempted it with the ropes, … a fear no smaller lay in wait: that even if we came through the surge, we should approach land in that state at night. But day comes first, and we see the sun, I do not know if ever more gladly. The wind grew easier as the warmth increased, and the dew, departing, let us use the ropes and handle the sail. To change it, we had no other spare one, for it had been pawned. We gathered it in as one gathers up the folds of tunics; and before four hours had passed, we who [had expected death] disembark in a remote and utterly desolate spot, which had neither city nor farm for a neighbour, some hundred and thirty stades from a farm. The ship rode in the open, for the place was no harbour, and lay on one anchor; the second had been sold, and a third anchor Amarantus had never acquired. …

We, when we touched the dearest earth, embraced it as though it were a living mother; and offering hymns of thanksgiving to God, as we used to do, we added to them also the fortune just past, through which we had been saved beyond hope; and we stayed there two days in succession, until the sea should calm. But since there was no way to travel by land, with no human being in sight, we again ventured on the sea; and setting out right at the beginning of day, we sailed with the wind astern that whole day and the next. As that was ending, the wind left us, and we were vexed; but we were to long for a calm, as it turned out. It was the thirteenth of the waning month; and it was likely that there would coincide the conjunction of the stars and those notorious days, during which, they say, no one sailing ever felt confident; and although we ought to have been lying in harbour, we had unawares run back out to sea. The commotion began with the northern winds, and it rained heavily during the night of the conjunction. Then the winds ran riot, and the sea had become a stirred-up brew. Our state was such as is likely in such events (not to narrate similar sufferings twice); in it the very size of the storm did us some good: … the ship. Then the yard, broken in the middle, came near to destroying us all; but since it did not destroy us, this very thing saved us; for otherwise it was not possible to bear the violence of the wind. For the sail again was stubborn and would not run freely to be lowered. So, having beyond expectation relieved ourselves of the insatiable violence of the drive, we were carried a day and a night in succession. When it was already about the second cock-crow, we unawares struck against a rugged rock jutting out from the land so as to form a short peninsula. A shout went up, since someone passed the word that we were near the land itself, and a great din arose, not at all in harmony: the sailors shuddering, while we, from inexperience, were clapping our hands and embracing one another, not knowing how to cope with the fullness of our joy. Yet this was said to be the greatest of the dangers that surrounded us. When day was already breaking, someone waves his hand … the suspect places, and others in which we might take heart. At last he came alone in a little two-oared boat; tying it to the ship, he takes the rudder in hand, and the Syrian gladly gave up the chief seat. Having gone no more than fifty stades (… I think they call the place), he set us down on the beach, and was hailed as saviour and good genius. A little later he brought in another merchantman, and then another, and before evening five cargo ships had been saved by the divine old man, a deed most contrary to that of Nauplius; for he did not, as that man did, show [false fires] in the storm. On the next day … us. They were from Alexandria … And now we are an entire fleet in a small dockyard.

But since our provisions were by now eaten up (for being unaccustomed to misfortune, and not expecting to be overdue, we had put on board only moderate supplies, and did not use even these moderately), the old man remedied this too, giving us nothing, for he was not like one who had anything; but he showed us rocks in which, he said, breakfast and dinner for each day lay hidden for those willing to work. Fishing from there, we have now been living for a seventh day: the men …, the lads feasting on gudgeons and rainbow wrasses; I and the Roman devotee are strengthened by limpets. The limpet is a hollow shellfish which, once it takes hold of a rock, clings with all its strength. At first we lived meagrely from the hunt, each one holding on to whatever he had caught, and no one gave a gift to anyone. But now all are in greater plenty, for the following reason. The women, Libyan women to the women on board, would gladly provide even birds' milk; at any rate they give what the air and the land bear: cheeses, … hens' eggs; one woman even gave a bustard. These women bring the gifts down to the ship, and those who receive them share with anyone who wishes. And these now present us with the catch of their hunting; and one comes after another, a boy after a man and a man after a boy, always bringing me some gift of hospitality, one a little fish caught on a hook, another something else; in any case some good thing of the kind the rocks bear. For I am not willing to accept what comes from the women, and this too for your sake, so that no truce may be made between me and them, and then, when I have to swear it off, I be at a loss in denying it. Otherwise, what prevented us from living in luxury on the necessities? So much flows in from many sides. You, then, will count the friendliness of the natives, which they show to the women who are their guests, as a virtue; but the other matter is strange, worth narrating, especially at the leisure I now have. The wrath of Aphrodite, so one would guess, holds the country; for they suffer what the women of Lemnos suffered. They have huge breasts, out of all proportion to the chest, so that the babies suck the nipple not under the arm but over the shoulder, the breast being thrown back. Unless one should say that Ammon and the land of Ammon is no better a nurse of flocks than of children, and that nature has granted to humans and beasts alike more abundant and richer springs of milk, and for this there is need of richer udders and paps. Learning from outsiders that not every female is made like this, they disbelieve it; and whenever they lay hold of a foreign woman, they treat her kindly and do everything until they have searched her bosom. The one who has seen tells another, and they call one another, like the Cicones; and they run together to the sight, and bring gifts for it. Now we had among us a little slave-girl from Pontus, in whom art and nature together [had made a waist] slimmer than the ants' …

'It is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man.' But I learn that men of the most godless heresy of Eunomius, … Quintianus by name, and … have come, again to commit adultery against the Church and to set up certain false teachers, a snare for the souls of the simple; … for this very purpose they have sailed down here, bringing … For the lawsuit is a pretext for impiety, or rather a contest on behalf of impiety. These bastard presbyters, then, these newly arrived apostles of the devil and of Quintianus, must not escape your notice as they sow the tares among the wheat. Their hiding places are plain to all. You know which estates would receive them; you know which houses stand open to the robbers. Pursue the thieves …

Carnas is still putting it off, and becomes just neither willingly nor under compulsion. He must come, so that we may know what he has to say, and with what eyes he will look us in the face, from whom … against their will, the horse he stole, to buy it, 'so that', as he says, 'a soldier may not be without a horse'. He offers quite a small sum of silver, and when they will not sell he does not give the horse back, but thinks he holds it justly; and this though he is no Agathocles or Dionysius, whom their tyrannies permitted to be so very wicked, but Carnas from Kapharodis, whom it is not hard to bring back under the laws. If, then, anyone brings him over to you, let us not be ignorant of it either, so that those who …

How deeply do you think my heart was stung when a report spread through the city that [you had been struck by] some terrible disease, and worse than terrible? Then the report proved false; and I think some utterly wicked man, seizing on the name of an eye inflammation as a pretext, blew the rumour up and made a tragedy of it. May whatever lies he told about you recoil on his own head; but thanks be to God, who has let us hear better news. One ought not, as the saying goes, to have your affairs signalled to us by the stars, nor to find out what rumour says, but best of all to have you with us; if not, to read your letters and know your news from you. But you neglect us too much, as perhaps God wills.

You will surely not say that the bearer of the festal letters escaped your notice. No: you saw him and overlooked him, and you did not think it worth while to remember your brother and add a letter to him telling how you are and in what circumstances you are. For to me it is no matter of indifference to know your news. And since I am grieved in all my own affairs, I would like to rejoice in yours; but you have deprived me even of this consolation. It ought not to be so. For even if we were not born of the same parents, … our upbringing was common and our education common; and what indeed was not common? Everything through everything has bound us to one another. But, as is said, ill fortune is a terrible thing; and whenever an adverse time comes upon someone, then everything else is tested, and the minds of brothers and of friends. It will be enough for me to learn your news even from others. Only may God be the shepherd of good things for you; for such is the news we long to hear about you.

[Letter 9] May a deep and sleek old age await you, most holy and most wise. For in other respects your being preserved would be a gain to life, … and the greatest addition to the school of Christ is the number of the festal books growing with the years. For the discourse sent down this year both delighted the cities and benefited them, the one by the greatness of its thoughts, the other by the grace of its words.

[Letter 10] I greet you yourself, blessed lady, and through you your most blessed companions. Long ago I would have complained that I am not thought worthy of letters; but now I know that I am overlooked by all of you, because, though I do no wrong, I am unfortunate in many things, indeed in as many as a man can be. But if I could read your letters and learn how you are spending your time (surely you are in better circumstances and are finding fortune kinder), I would be only half unhappy, being happy in you. But now this too is one of the hardships that have overtaken me. Besides my children, I have been deprived of my friends and of the goodwill of all; and, greatest of all, of your most divine soul, which alone I had hoped would remain to me, stronger than the spite of fortune and the currents of fate.

Neither did I formerly prevail over you, though with all my strength and all my devices I tried to escape the priesthood, nor have you now prevailed over me. It was divine after all, both the 'not yet' then and the 'already' now. I would have chosen many deaths rather than this ministry, for I did not reckon the dignity of the office to be within my measure. But since God has brought upon me not what I asked but what he willed, I pray that he who has been the dispenser of my life may also become the protector of what he has dispensed. For I have spent my life in the leisure of philosophy and in contemplation, engaging only so far in life with the body, and in being a citizen of cities, as to discharge my duty: how shall I be equal to cares that never let up? Or how, giving myself up to a crowd of affairs, shall I still attend to the beauties of the mind, which can be harvested only in blessed leisure, without which all life is unlivable for me and those like me? I myself would not know. But to God, they say, all things are possible, even the impossible. You yourselves, then, lift up suppliant hands to God for me, and charge the people in the city, and all who live on the estates or belong to the village churches, to offer prayers for us, all together and each one. For if I am not left forsaken by God, then I shall know that the priesthood is not a descent from philosophy but an ascent to it.

Go back to your mother the Church, brother Cyril. You were not cut off from her but separated for a season, a season set in proportion to your sins. For I seem to know clearly that our common father of holy memory would long ago have done this too, had death not come first; for to fix the punishment within a measure was the mark of a mind that from the start promised pardon. Consider, then, that it is that holy priest himself who has given you your return, and approach God with a soul pure of passion and holding no memory of wrongs. And keep that holy and God-loving man in all reverent remembrance; this too, surely, is not against your wish.

To Peter the presbyter. Let God lead every work and word. The bearer of the festal letters, which announce that the principal day of the feast is the nineteenth of the month Pharmuthi, since the night leading into it holds the mystery of the resurrection: show him every kindness both coming and going, and send him on his way in each direction with relays of animals. For, so that an ancient and ancestral custom might not fail the churches, he gave himself into the very midst of the enemies' weapons, undertaking to travel through dangerous country. Persuade the city also to pray for us. For it must now begin to feel its own ill-advisedness concerning us, since it called to the priesthood not one who has freedom of speech before God to pray for a whole people, but one who himself needs the people's prayers to be saved. Since there was also a meeting of the synod here (a multitude of many priests), which the present season had gathered, when I set myself to write to you … And if I had nothing to say of the kind you are accustomed to hear, this is excusable in me, but it is a charge against you, because you chose one who does not know the oracles of God in place of those who do.

So do children defend their parents! I have my thanks. Carnas has become my suppliant, and God made his supplication the more to be respected. For where [would it be right] for a priest, for a private grievance of his own, to look on while a man was being led off under arrest on one of the fast days? So the man who was leading him off did not let him go; he was deprived of him. If, then, he is to pay the penalty for having been overpowered, we shall have come round to being kind to those who did wrong, and to having wronged those who did no wrong at all.

I am faring so very badly that I need a hydroscope. Have one cast in bronze for me and … It is a cylindrical tube, with the shape and size of a flute. Along one straight line it bears the notches by which we test the weight of waters. It is closed at one end by a cone set on at an equal position, so that the cone and the tube have a common base. This is precisely what is called the baryllium. Whenever you let the tube down into water, it will stand upright and allow you to count the notches; and these are the indications of the weight.

… may you receive, mother, sister, teacher, and in all these things benefactress, and all that is honoured both in fact and in name. As for me, my bodily weakness depends on a cause in the soul. The memory of my children who have departed is consuming me little by little. Synesius was worth living only so long as he had no experience of the evils of life. Then, like a stream held back, they burst on me all at once, and the sweetness of life was changed. May I cease either to live or to remember the tomb of my sons! But may you yourself be well; and greet the blessed companions, beginning with father Theotecnus and brother Athanasius, all of them in order; and if anyone has been added to them so as to be dear to you, I must owe him thanks because he is dear to you; greet him too from me as a dearest friend. If you care at all for my affairs, you do well; and if you do not care, I do not care about that either.

Many good things befall so-and-so, through whom …

So-and-so is a councillor of the city in which I begot my children. In a way, then, all Alexandrians ought to be honoured and looked after by us as fellow citizens. But this man has the further claim of being a relative of the blessed Theodore, a man of whom we keep a very warm memory, and who … deserves not to be neglected by those who hold the first place here in public life. These men brought him to me, [asking me] to send him on to you with letters, … thinking that all would go well for him if he obtained from me an introduction to you and to so-and-so. I, then, have given what they asked; whether not in vain, you will show.

I do not think I am to blame for making this a joint letter; it would be blameworthy if I separated by letters those joined in mind. Greetings, then, admirable friends. The man who hands you the letter, who has been sent to you on the public road to convey gold, cherish in whatever way you can, since he was recommended to me by the whole council. And I would like to become the cause of some good to him; yet I do not know that it is more fitting for others than for you to care for us and for those we take up …

While the blessed Theodore was still alive, he was the common patron of all the people of the Pentapolis, but he was attached especially to our parents, through his zeal in everything and the eloquence and grace of his tongue. For the many and most pleasant favours from him, then, … let us repay our gratitude to Ammonius his nephew. I, for my part, have paid my share. What could one who is absent do, but recommend the man to those who are present? That his stay there should not be burdensome to him is your task.

If Theodore's memory lives with your reverence (and how should it not?), grant to those who are bound to the departed the honour shown to his nephew. For you will have done good to a good man and gratified the council of great Alexandria, since they came in a body and brought the man to me, and asked that he might profit somewhat from our letters. To give the letters was our part; that they should be of benefit to him is sought from you.

I was pleased. But how much, do you think? Very much indeed, from the depth of my heart, I was pleased to learn that the golden children have become your children by law through the emperor's word: most of all because I love you (what could be more just?); then because I hate wicked men, whose hopes, nursed in darkness and in corners, the good fortune of the children … Such is the luxury of the Syrians: it makes people forget relatives and friends. For this is the fifth month since you greeted us by letter, and that though nature has given you the gift of dictating letters not only for need but also for display and ambition. But if you yourself are well, and the golden children, and their mother of fair children, this too is enough for us.

Minds, however, ought not to be lifted up along with fortunes, nor ought one to think the remembrance of old friends of less account than one's present rank. But you have forgotten us for a long time. It ought not to be so, since a strong affection joined us to one another.

With me the increase of affection keeps pace with the years. As for you, if you feel the same but have no leisure, because of the crowd of business, to honour us with letters as is fitting, even once, and those whom it is fitting, stealing yourself from public affairs for as long as it takes to write a letter, let us know just that. But if you recognize that the suspicion of forgetfulness against you is true, correct it by a change of mind, and [give] yourself back to us …

But if neither the people of Cyrene nor the cities of their neighbours repay you worthy thanks for what the admirable Anastasius writes to them, at any rate the gratitude of God will be yours, to whom you make yourself akin by … best of philosophers. For so I may call you, my friend, as the facts dictate.

If you honour the virtue of philosophy, you will honour it not only in those who are present and share in it, but also in the absent. The divine Amyntianus, who was once among us and has obtained a better lot, is present, it seems to me, even while he seems absent. A close relative of his, his first cousin, is being wronged by Soterichus there among you. Show that …

God says that debts must be forgiven. One person owes a loan of gold; another owes the paying of a penalty. So the man who has let go the penalty owed for an offence that went unnoticed has obeyed God.

For the crowd of people and the business that come from me, blame yourself. In your ambition to make it plain to everyone that you hold me in every honour, you opened the road to me for all the oppressed. Do you know, then, what you will do, if there is ever to be an end both of my being pestered by many and of your being pestered by me about many things? Although the man for whom I am writing asks only for moderate and humane things, and is most worthy to obtain them, as everyone knows, let him fail to obtain anything from you, no less than if he were utterly wicked and asked for utterly wicked things. Do this, and when I come to you, supposedly to complain, order your servants to bolt the doors in my face. If some see this happen and others hear of it from those who saw it, from then on you and I will enjoy a deep peace, since no one will any longer run to me and weep before me. But if you lose heart, and are unwilling to have people forgive you for this, then put up with doing some good many times a day to people who have become your suppliants through me and through God. But I know well that you will not grow weary of doing good; nor, then, shall I, as I supply you with occasions that suit your nature.

I care both for you and for this man: for you, that you may not do wrong; for him, that he may not be wronged. And if you too think, with Plato, that doing wrong is a greater evil than suffering wrong, it seems that I am doing you rather than him a favour when I plead on behalf of a man who is being made to pay a penalty for things in which he did no wrong. …

If cities have souls as their overseers, divine and spiritual beings (and indeed they have), consider that all of them are grateful to you and remember the benefits of which you were the cause for all the provinces during your great office. Believe that these very souls stand beside you at every critical moment as your advocates and allies, and pray to the common God that fitting rewards may come to you for imitating him as far as it is possible. For doing good is the one work that man and God have in common; and imitation is a making-akin, and joins the imitator to what it imitates. Be disposed, then, as one made akin to God by sharing his beneficent purpose, and live with sweet hopes such as befit such a disposition of soul, most magnificent sir, you who alone, or with few others, are justly given that title. Through the most revered voice of the father, I greet the young Taurus, the good hope of the Romans.

The fellow who is a slave both by name and by choice, whom I bought in ignorance from the heirs of Theodore as a wrestling-trainer, has long been wicked. For he was born and bred badly, and he did not miss an upbringing worthy of his nature, from childhood in … Now, as Lysias would have said, he is finished, complete, the very limit of disgust. To Hermes and Heracles, the overseers of the wrestling-school, he is not in the least suited; but he is temple-warden to Cotytto and the other Attic Konisaloi, and if there are any other spirits of that stamp, he cares for all of them and they all care for him. Other punishment I would not take from him; for wickedness is punishment enough for the wicked. But since he has proved unfit to live with masters who are philosophers, in whose house, while they keep at home, shame goes about, let the city that has him keep him. For whoever saw the brothel-haunter strutting through the market-place in a garland, drunk with perfumes and revelling and filled with every licentiousness, and singing songs suited to his way of life, laid the blame on those who own him. See to it, then, that you hand him over to the ship's captain and compel him to sail straight to the land that bore him; for she would more justly put up with him. Let him sail bound on the deck, and not go down into the hold; otherwise do not be surprised if he leaves many of the jars half empty for you; and if the voyage were prolonged, he would sup the fragrant wine down to the dregs and persuade the sailors to do the very same. For besides everything else, the mischief is most persuasive at leading the way to pleasures. And who of those who sail the sea for pay is so grave as not to dissolve in laughter when the scum dances the cordax as the cup goes round? He plays many other buffooneries, against which the captain must be fortified. Odysseus, so as not to be ruined by pleasure, passed the Sirens' shore bound; this fellow, so that he may not ruin those on board with pleasure, … if they …

… I seem to be doing what echoes do: the words I have received I give back, praising the admirable Alexander to you.

Providence does not yet care for the Romans; but it will care some day, and those able to save the commonwealth will not keep at home for ever. Yet for the rhetor, your foster-brother, even the power you now have is enough for whatever he happens to need. Let him enjoy it, then: now this power, by himself alone; later, together with all the provinces, that other power too.

Athanasius has taken the shortest road to wealth. He has decided that he must close in on the dying and extract from them, by persuasion and by force, whatever he can. No public notary summoned to a will could escape his notice; he understands at once and leaps …

On the sixteenth of the month Athyr, the late Castricius became just that ['the late'], having seen and described a dreadful apparition. …

John, whom I love for the very reason that he loves you, has been wrestling with a severe illness. Yet what was dreadful for him was not the illness, but being away from your sacred head; for even now he is in the same state. And a third thing, added to these, makes the illness harder: he longs to do something befitting a soldier, and he chafes at the idleness forced on him.

I think your divine soul was sent down for this very purpose, to be a common good for mankind, and to be grateful to those who recommend people in need of justice, because they supply you with occasions that suit your nature. It is not because Herodes is my relative, but because he needs justice, that I recommend the young man to you. He comes of a most illustrious family, and inherited his father's land subject to the senatorial tax; yet since he became a governor, he is required to pay like newly enrolled councillors, and to become a double contributor: in one respect because of his property, in another because of the office he held.

Longing and need draw me to you. I ask, then, whether you will wait for my coming.

I have sent you as a gift a horse most excellently endowed for every quality that befits a horse: you will use him in races, use him when you go out hunting, and in the contests of war; and when you lead the victory procession for the Libyan trophy. For I do not know whether he is better for the procession or for war. And if he is uglier to look at than the Nisaean horses, having a lumpy skull, …

I have hired for you a ship of well-born men, who sail the sea with more skill than luck. For the merchantmen of the Carpathians have a reputation for being endowed with intelligence, like those of the Phaeacians of old, before the divine wrath came upon the island, …

A relative of mine is being wronged; and you are both a friend and the one appointed to judge. By one act of attention, then, you can oblige both me and the laws. Let Asphalius, then, return to being master of the jars, receiving the sentence in accordance with his father's will, and let the accusation not stand in the way of an immediate hearing. For when ought justice to be given, if not at the season when we most need God?

Some god, or reason, or spirit has persuaded Sosenas that … even according to places something befalls people, as regards finding or missing God's favour. Faring badly among us, and utterly cut off from his patrimony, he has decided to sail to the regions of Thrace, to make it up with Fortune there. If, then, you are on friendly terms with the goddess, commend the young man to her, and let her find him some source of money. It is easy if she wishes; for she transferred the estate of Nonnus, Sosenas's father, to others without difficulty. Let her, then, declare Sosenas heir of another man's father. So justice would come out of injustice.

As on many other occasions I have been useful to you in critical times, and consoled you in the harshness of fortune, partly by words and partly by deeds, as my power suggested each time, so now too, concerning the affairs that have overtaken you, I think I should contribute some advice, since I cannot contribute action. For it is not right for Synesius, as long as he breathes and is able, not to be eager in every way to do his friends some good. Hear, then, what I think it right to say to you.

If Rumour is a goddess, as one of our poets says, you killed the late Aemilius, not by doing the murder but by planning it: you composed a barbarous drama and sent in as the slayer the most savage of your own soldiers. For Rumour says this; and it is not lawful for her to lie, since she is a goddess. But if Hesiod says nothing to the point, and many things are said for nothing, then this too, about you, is one of those many things; as I at least would wish, for I make less account of a loss in money than of a loss in a friend. And now, if you are not guilty of what you are accused of, you are unfortunate, it seems, but not unjust; would that you were not even unfortunate. In the first case hatred would justly be owed to you; in this case, pity as well. But I think that I, being too easily captured by long acquaintance, would even in the first case hate the deed and yet pity you. And it belongs to one who pities to help as far as he can, and to find out where he thinks he may be of some use. In either case, then, it befits me to advise you what seems best. And the same course seems to be advantageous to you whether you are guilty or not guilty. Go before the laws, and give yourself up to the judge together with all your soldiers, if you care at all for them too. And if the terrible deed was done, keep pleading until you obtain from the verdict that you be handed to the executioner and pay the penalty. It will stand you in good stead before the courts below to depart purified beforehand, comrade John.

Do not think this exhortation idle talk, nor imagine that I am mocking you. So may I have profit from sacred philosophy, and from my own children besides, as I would not have given such advice to you, who are dearest to me, if it were a thing I wish only on my enemies. May it never enter their minds that it is better for the wrongdoer to pay a penalty he chooses himself; rather, may they never cease prospering in their wrongdoing, so that they may be wicked for a longer time and owe all their penalties there. But to you, out of friendship, I venture to tell something of the secret doctrines: how different it is to pay the penalty in the gross body and in the image. For God is stronger than man, and the human is a shadow of the whole divine order. But just as in states the executioners are the hands of the laws, so the Avengers render the same service to the nature of the universe. Dai-…

Wicked strangers are troubling the Church. Go out against them; for pegs are knocked out by pegs …

Not even Amasis acted nobly when he took care not to weep over the misfortunes of Polycrates, which he foresaw would come. But by sending a herald to renounce friendship while Polycrates was prospering, he made it plain that he would have wept if the misfortune had come before the renunciation. But you stayed with us as long as we did not collide with fortune; then you sailed off along with her. For rumour says, through those who come from Thrace, that you neither think nor say anything kind about us. This is not simply to renounce friendship, but to proclaim enmity. It would have been enough, if anything, not to share our grief; but to add grief besides is far gone in cruelty, and like neither Amasis nor anything human. But perhaps you have considered your own interests better. Do what you must; only, I hope you do it with pleasure; for it would be half the evil if, by what I suffer badly, I were at least pleasing to my friends.

Count Peter also, the wrath of the Pentapolis, a man who sets about undoing the laws not by any art; and yet I hate even the man who sets about it in that way, as God knows, and Dioscurides. But this one is more headstrong than that man. Whatever property he desires he first seizes and brings under his control, and then he goes to law. And if he is convicted by the vote, he prevails by his hand. So he did here: first he seized a jar; someone indicted him; the man proved his case; Peter did not give it back, and even threatened the public officers with blows. I was indignant at him, and thought life not worth living where some private persons have hands stronger than the [laws] …, [and resolved] by the sentence to come to the help of the constitution of the state. For if he had succeeded, we would soon have seen many Peters. In this I am grateful to the admirable Martyrius, who shared my indignation most and served me most eagerly of all; for this may some good come to him from God. But it would be well that he suffer no harm from Anthemius, if Peter should demand him, as he threatened. That this may not happen, I beg very earnestly, I beg you yourself and, through you, that admirable man and philosopher Troilus: prevent the vagabond from coming against the laws by means of the laws. I care for the Pentapolis, and also for not having become the cause of misfortune to a friend. How a sycophant might be checked is not for me to find but for you, who of all men are most resourceful for good ends …

You do well to return to the city that holds the emperor. For good fortune was with you even in the mountains of the Isaurians; but there is a good fortune made less fortunate by the place. And to me in particular it matters that you should prosper at the palace itself, where, staying, you will both receive and send letters, the most precious to me of all the goods that come from Thrace.

Hiero enjoyed more good things from the company of Simonides than Simonides from Hiero. And yes, by the god of friendship, mine and yours, I have not counted you more blessed in the friendship of the great Anthemius than that great Anthemius himself in yours. For to a man who has power, what possession is finer than a friend who offers a character not for sale? Such I know Theotimus to be, that gentlest and God-beloved head. In this, indeed, you do more than Simonides; for Simonides himself admitted that he conversed for money. But this is common to both: as Simonides commended Hiero to the succession of the ages, so through the poetry of Theotimus, as long as there are Greeks, Anthemius will be much spoken of in the schools of letters. Let him, then, increase the fortunes of the Romans, and you his name. For God has given to poetry the stewardship of glory, whose beauty has come round to you …

'John has killed Aemilius,' says one; another says that John's political enemies fabricated this against him. The truth justice knows, and time will discover. But I, though the matter is unclear, think one should renounce all of them alike: him, because he is the sort of man who, even if he did not do it, would have done it, and has incurred an accusation fitting his character; and them, even if they did not fabricate it, because they would have fabricated it, and the attempt is just like them. For there is a kind of character to which a certain suspicion is foreign, and even if many conspirators testified, they would gain nothing toward belief. For example, if someone prosecuted Ajax for prostitution, there would be a broad laugh. But Alexander, if not a woman, was at least effeminate, and the charge suited him. Sisyphus and Odysseus I hate; for even if they should say something true, they were such men as to lie most of the time. As for me, in my misfortunes I am very fortunate, being deprived of such citizens, both as enemies and as friends. Let a wall be built between me and all of them; I have nothing to do with any of them. May I live a stranger among strangers. My character separated us before the place did. … I mourn the famous soil of Cyrene, which once was held by men like Carneades and Aristippus, but now by Johns and Juliuses; having lived with them unseasonably, I go abroad seasonably. And you, do not write to me any longer about any affairs there, nor recommend people who have lawsuits; for I would no longer give myself to any of them. I would be most unfortunate if I were deprived of the good things of my dearest fatherland, but shared in its disputes and affairs, which drag me away from the ease of philosophy; and if, having chosen poverty from inaction as a gain, [I should take on] other people's troubles …

Setting out from Phycus at the beginning of dawn, we put in late in the afternoon at the gulf by Erythra; and having stayed only long enough to drink and to take on water (springs of pure and very sweet water issue onto the beach itself), with the sailors hurrying us on, … with a moderate wind but always astern, and not hoping to accomplish much on any one day, we found that we had covered all that was needed without noticing it. On the fifth day we saw the beacon which they raise from the tower as a signal for ships putting in, and quicker than words we had disembarked and were on the island of Pharos. It is a wretched island, with neither natural woodland nor fruit, but only some salt …

… the man from whom, I think, you bought the openwork shoes last year too. Now they say he is trading on a larger scale, bringing garments of Attic make: summer dresses that would suit you, and cloaks for us for the season of the year. Before he manages to sell them all, or at least those of finer workmanship (for those who come across him first naturally think it right to look after themselves, not those who come behind), invite the stranger in and buy me three or four of the cloaks. Whatever you lay out for the price will certainly be repaid you many times over by me.

The length of a letter is a charge of unfamiliarity against the one who carries it. But the admirable Acacius knows all that I know, and will tell even more than he knows, both because he is your devoted friend and because he has a tongue that outdoes the facts. So I make this letter a gift to the custom of greeting you rather than to any need. Yet to report to you about your son Dioscurius, that he is well, and that he reads and applies himself to books: let this be the honour of the letter. We have given him a company of brothers, adding to Hesychius a pair of boys, brothers. May God make them fortunate, both for themselves and for their brothers, for their parents' house and the rest of the family, and for their ancestral cities.

Many people here, both laymen and priests, fashioning certain dreams which they themselves call revelations, are likely, it seems, to do me real harm unless I manage to reach sacred Athens as soon as possible. If, then, you happen to meet a ship's captain from the Piraeus, write to us; for we shall receive letters there. I shall gain from the journey to Athens not only release from the present evils, but also no longer having to bow down for their learning before those who come from there. They differ in no way from us ordinary mortals, at least not in understanding Aristotle and Plato; yet they go about among us like demigods among mules, because they have seen the Academy and the Lyceum, and the Poikile, the Painted Porch in which Zeno taught philosophy, which is no longer painted: for the proconsul took away the panels, and so put a stop to their thinking too highly of their wisdom.

You had loosed the stern-cable, and I halted the mules … by the Zephyrian shore. As I got down from the carriage, your sail was already hoisted and the wind astern. But I escorted you with my eyes as far as they could follow, and I said much to the winds on behalf of a beloved soul, commending the boat to them, because the most precious cargo had been entrusted to it. And they, since they are not without love of what is beautiful, promised me your passage there and back. These, being good spirits, would never lie. But as you asked them to carry you from here to there, ask them also to carry you from there to here; for they would come to you much more gladly then.

You wrong me, divine and sacred head. My soul is simple and easily captured by familiarity; you shook it into loving you and your niece exceptionally, and then took from me both yourself and your niece. While I had her, I beheld a double image, and through the young woman her uncle was present to me. But now everything dear is gone, and I blame my nature for its excessive proneness to being hurt. And if philosophy is of any use, I shall recover myself into something more manly, and from now on you will have to do with one made of maple, and less easily bent.

The evil-working powers in the world serve the needs of providence, for they punish those who deserve punishment; yet they are hated by God and to be shunned. 'For I will raise up', he says, 'a nation against you', from which you will suffer such and such things. And at the end he says that he will go out against those very ones whom he sends against them, because, when they took you over, they showed no pity and did not treat you humanely. I have not learned the sacred syllables by heart; but I affirm that there is a place in the books where God is represented as saying this. And he did not say it so and then not do it. The Babylonian king razed the city of Jerusalem and enslaved the nation; and this same king before long went mad, and it came about by the justice of God that his city was so desolated that one would not believe there had ever been a city on the spot. Must one dare to ask God: 'Why do you raise up men as avengers against those who have sinned against you, and then, when they have served the divine will and become executioners of those against whom they were sent, and ought to receive thanks for their service, it is then above all that they are punished?' But has he moved us to the answer to what we ask him? Since the divine law was damaged here below, evils passed over to mankind; and evil-working things are evil in a special degree, for by the abundance of their nature they also become active. Since, then, evils have once come into being, it is the work of the divine wisdom and virtue and power not only to do good (for that is, so to speak, God's nature, as heating is the nature of fire and giving light the nature of light), but also, and above all, by means of evils devised by some, to bring about a good and useful end, and to make profitable use of what seem worthless things. For it belongs to a resourceful wisdom to use even evils when needed. So whenever he needs punishers, he uses now the spirits that lead the swarms of locusts, now those whose works are plagues, now a nation of barbarians, now a wicked ruler, and, in a word, natures fit for doing public harm. Yet he hates them all the same, because they have become fit for this. For God did not make instruments of calamity; but he readily used those who had ranked themselves for this. And that you have become useful for this purpose is the very thing that cuts you off completely from God. So also, of vessels, one is dishonourable and another honourable, both in fact and in reputation; for each is judged by the use it serves. A table, … I will give an account of my own affairs; for with a view to what follows it is well that you should hear these things from me.

From childhood it seemed to me a divine good to have leisure and ease of life: that which someone said belongs to divine natures, namely to nourish the mind and commend to God the one who has it and enjoys its fruit. Of the business that belongs to boys I had the smallest share, and of that of lads and young men. And when I came to manhood I differed in no way from a child in freedom from affairs; but, as if passing my life at a solemn festival, I kept the disposition of my soul gracious and calm through every age. Yet God did not for this reason make me useless to men; often private persons and cities alike made use of us when needed. For God granted me both to be able to do the greatest things and to will the finest. None of these things dragged me away from philosophy or cut short my happy leisure. For to act with jostling and toil and difficulty is what consumes time and drowns the soul in the cares of business; but when one has only to speak, and persuasion follows, and the word is most effective with the hearers, why spare words, so that someone may be freed from misfortune? Man is a precious creature; precious indeed, if Christ was crucified for him. And for me, to persuade men up to the present year was perhaps a divine lot; perhaps it was because I touched affairs only barely that I succeeded. For now the matter seems to have been put to the test. Along with many things that were clearly God's, I attributed this too to him, and I lived with good hopes, as in a sacred precinct, the world, a consecrated animal let loose to roam, dividing my life between prayer, books, and hunting; for, that soul and body may be healthy, one must toil for the one and ask God for the other. In such ease I drew out the years until the choice for the priesthood, before which I proved the greatest coward of all men who ever lived. I call to witness the God who is over all … to be grieved. At once there was passion in my soul, a medley of cares, an image-making of affairs, and God far away. If what is happening through Andronicus is an assault of demons, they have done all they wished. I no longer felt the sweetness I used to have in prayer; there was the outward form of prayer, but I was carried around everywhere among affairs, divided by anger and grief and every passion. Yet it is through the mind that we are with God; the tongue serves men in what concerns men. If, then, I have suffered inattention in prayer, the proof is at hand. Yet not in this alone have I reaped evil from the change of life; having found … I saw dead the one before whom I prayed to die. With such bitter landing-feasts did the city entertain us! As … human affairs go now up, now down, and a stream comes bringing many things at once, now auspicious, now inauspicious. But when it befell me to lose the dearest of my children, I would have done some dreadful thing to myself, so completely was I overcome by the passion. In other respects I am manly (I speak among those who know), and in most things a servant of reason; but I am so much weaker than familiarity that here the unreasoning prevails over reason. So I did not master the present passion even by the doctrines of philosophy. But Andronicus turned me round the other way, and made me keep my mind on the common misfortunes; and misfortunes have become consolations for misfortunes, drawing me toward themselves and knocking out passion by passion. Then, with the bitter perception of the present, comes the memory of past goods: from what to what we have come. And I live wretchedly, deprived of everything at once. The greatest of the evils, which also makes my life hopeless, is this: I was not accustomed to fail in my supplications to God, and now for the first time I know that I have prayed in vain. Then I see my house faring badly, and I am compelled to live in a fatherland in misfortune. Exposed to all, so that they may weep on me and each lament his own lot, I pity them with a useless pity. And there is shame besides: a fellow citizen, a man who had met with misfortunes and had public gold stolen from him, he [Andronicus] pressed for more than ten thousand staters, and, granting no delay, resolved to kill him … the people, through his vain attempt. A man of great mind would have done this even before experience; but we waited until the facts made you share our vote that to join political virtue to the priesthood is to spin together things that cannot be spun together.

The ancient time brought forth the same men as priests and judges; for both the Egyptians and the Hebrew nation were ruled for a long time by priests. Then, since, it seems to me, the divine work was being done in a human way, God separated the two lives: the one was declared sacred, the other a ruler's. For he turned the one kind of men toward matter, and ranked the others with himself; the one are ranked to be in affairs, we to be in prayers. And God requires what is good from both. Why, then, do you bring things back? Why do you try to join what God has separated? You who think fit not to administer us but to misadminister us. What could be more wretched than that? Do you need a protector? Go to the one who has charge of the laws of the state. Do you need something of God? Go to the priest of the city. Not that it is wholly possible to succeed here, but that I will be eager. If someone allows me to be at rest, perhaps I shall be able some day; for in one and the same act one turns away from matter and turns toward God. Contemplation is the end of a priesthood that does not belie its name; and contemplation and action do not consent to be together. For impulse is the movement of actions, and no impulse is free of passion; but the soul that is to become a receptacle of God must be empty of passions. 'For it is not lawful', he says, 'for the impure to touch the pure.' 'Be still, and know that I am God.' He who serves as priest together with philosophy needs leisure. I do not condemn those bishops who are engaged in affairs; but, knowing myself barely equal to one of the two, I admire those who are able for both. I have not the power to serve two masters. If there are some who are not harmed even by such condescension, they could both serve as priests and preside over cities. A ray of the sun, even if it touches mud, remains clean and undefiled; but if I suffered the same, I should need springs and the sea. And if it were possible for an angel, living as a man among men for more than thirty years, to take on nothing of the evils of matter by attachment to them, why should the Son of God have had to come down? But it is a superabundance of power to consort with lower things and remain in one's own nature, and to be affected in no way. This is a hymn to God; for a man it becomes a plea for excuse, as he reverently guards against the weakness of his own nature. On these terms I will be with you. … I shall not, however, deprive myself of judging occasions, so that whenever I can descend with profit, I do not refuse to descend, that is, to do some great good by an occasional turning to affairs. So God too governs. But to be stuck fast is the dreadful thing, which neither God's nature tolerates nor anyone who directs himself toward God. If I have been careful of money or possessions, if you know me as one who receives accounts of daily or yearly expenses, and then I am sparing of my time in your affairs, I am an impostor, and I ask no pardon. But if, having neglected my own household first, I ranked my life with the activity of the mind, what is strange if I ask the same of you? But since we do not please you in this, there being others who can do well in both at the same time, you may deliberate about what is better for the city and the churches and for me. I will not abjure the priesthood; may Andronicus never have so much power! But just as I did not become a public philosopher, nor set myself to playing to the theatre, nor opened a school, and nonetheless was and may be a philosopher, so I do not wish to be a public priest either. Not everyone can do everything. Having been alone with myself, and through the mind with God, and coming down from contemplation, I can hold conversations not without use with one or two; and not with men of the herd, but with any who, by the lot of nature or the good fortune of upbringing, have come to admire mind above body. And touching affairs at long intervals, with my own ease, I could be … useful at the right time. But buried under them, … I forget myself and do harm to the affairs. For it is not possible to do anything well while hating it. He who does not do what he has resolved with his whole mind comes dispirited to the action over which he must preside. But one who is a stranger to leisure, and could make no use of leisure, but is all that a man most useful to the people is, a soul most capacious, sufficient for the cares of all; one who is so formed and so wills: such a man would even be grateful for the circumstances that draw him to themselves. For they grant occasions to his nature, and the greatest provision for success is love of the work. Such a most profitable man, then, must be chosen by all of you, and chosen by us of our own accord, who alone are barely saved. What holds you back? Because it has not yet been done, is it right that it should not be done now? Time has found out and corrected many needed things. Not everything happens according to precedent; each thing that has happened had a beginning, and before it happened it had not yet happened. It is more right that the useful should be preferred to custom. Let us give a beginning to a better custom. He must, then, be chosen in place of us, or along with us, but in any case chosen, … the man. Whoever he is, he will certainly appear far wiser than I in political matters, and will be able to deal with these wretched little men on your behalf and to handle them. So if it does not yet seem good, let us put this off until another time; for it will be possible to deliberate about it alone and with one another. But now … since the council has gone after the madness of Andronicus, …

Andronicus of Berenice, who was born, raised, and grew up to the evil fate of the Pentapolis, and who bought the governorship of the land that bore him: let no one consider him a Christian or call him one, but as one accursed by God let him be driven out of every church, with all his household. Not because he has become the last plague of the Pentapolis, after earthquake, after locust, after famine, after fire, after war, coming upon what they had left and going over it thoroughly; the first to bring into the country strange kinds and shapes of instruments of torture (and let it be said that he alone has used them): the finger-press, the ear-trap, the lip-twister; so that those who escaped the experience and the sight of them by dying first in the war were called blessed by those who survived to a wretched fate. No, but because he was the first and only one among us to blaspheme Christ in deed and in word: in deed, from the time when he nailed his own decrees to the door of the church, shutting off from those whom he treated unlawfully the right of supplication at the inviolable table, and threatening the priests of God with things from which even Phalaris of Acragas, or Chephren the Egyptian, or Sennacherib the Babylonian would have shrunk, he who sent to Jerusalem the men who reproached Hezekiah and God. That day, I say, bore a second cross of God; for that insulting placard hung from the sacred door to the reproach of Christ. And the sun looked on these things, and men read them; not when Tiberius Claudius governed the state, under whom Pilate was sent to govern the Jews, but while the pious house of Theodosius holds the sceptres of the Romans, from whom Andronicus secretly courted office for himself, with the mind of a Pilate. It was a laughingstock to those of other faiths who passed by …

The man to whom I have given this letter, though a philosopher in soul, is a rhetor by profession. As long as Anysius was here and the Pentapolis still existed, he practised it among us. But since the time after you, having sold us to the enemy, has made peace from lawsuits, he has decided to sail to another market, where the tongue is for sale, the rhetors' merchandise, and makes the rhetor known. Win for him the friendship of a man who has been appointed to govern provinces; and, yes, by the god of friendship, mine and yours, the man of whom you ask the favour will thank you for it when he comes back after making trial of him.

If I indict you for wronged friendship, with God and godly men as judges, you will be convicted by every vote. For what sort of appendage did I become to your hostility toward my brother? Since he, not with my approval, was acting against Sabbatius on behalf of the late Phaus, and you could not persuade him by talking to him, you turned your anger on me and did me all the harm you could; and I, since it was then permitted, accepted the challenge to quarrel. But now it is neither permitted, nor do I wish it. For my age, happily, is withering my love of contention, and sacred laws, they say, forbid it. At the same time I remember our common upbringing and education, and the time we spent at Cyrene, which one ought to think stronger than Sabbatius's lawsuits. Begin, then, a good thing, friendship; and receive a greeting from me, who count as loss the time I have kept silent. How stung do you think I was even then? But I held out as well as I could. Such an evil is contentiousness.

Asterius the shorthand-writer saw a large Egyptian rug, not one to be laid under bedding but one that is itself the whole bedding, and asked us for it at the time when I had to sleep in front of the great government offices. I promised to leave it to him as a gift when I departed; for, compared with the Thracian snow, it was not possible to give such things away. Now, then, I send it, since I did not leave it then; and you will give it to him, together with the apology, of which you yourself will be witness, if you recall the times, and before that, when I was withdrawing from the city, God shook the earth many times a day; and …

Praise is the wage of virtue, and we bring it to the most illustrious Marcellinus now that he has laid down his office, now that every suspicion of flattery is at rest. He took over cities that were at war: from without, through the multitude and madness of the barbarians; from within, through the disorder of the soldiers and the greed of their officers. Like a god appearing, he made the enemy more sober by one battle, and his subjects by daily care, and obtained for the cities peace from both terrors. He disdained gains which custom has made seem lawful. He did not plot against wealth; he did not insult poverty; he was devout toward God, just toward the citizens, humane toward the needy. Therefore a priest who is a philosopher is not ashamed to praise him, with whom no one ever found testimony corrupted by favour. We would have wished the court to be present among you, and that jointly and singly each of the people of Ptolemais might have made him a return, the possible, if not the just one, since word falls far short of deed. I would certainly have spoken then for the community. But since he happens to be abroad, we set down our testimony in a letter, not being pressed to it, but …

One must use the friendships of the powerful, not abuse them.

Do not ask for great things, so that one of two things may not happen: either you cause pain by obtaining them, or you suffer pain by not obtaining them.

I have sent both Dionysiuses, so that of the books you may have the one as received and the other as received back.

[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.

Even if fortune cannot take everything from me, it wishes to take all it can, 'who has bereft me of many good sons'. But my choosing what is best and siding with the wronged it will not take away; may it never prevail over our judgment! I hate injustice, for that I can do; I would like to prevent it too, but this also is among the things taken away, and it is gone before my children. 'Long ago the Milesians were brave.' There was a time when I too was of use to my friends, and you used to call me a good belonging to others, since I spent on others the respect I had from the very powerful; and they were my hands. But now I am left bereft of all, unless you have power; and indeed I count you, together with virtue, a good that cannot be plundered. You, then, always have power, and may you have it, using your power most nobly. As for Nicaeus and Philolaus, fine and good young men and my relatives, let all who honour your wishes, private persons and officials alike, take care that they may return and become masters of their own property.

Whom, then, whom is it fitting for men like you to admire? The self-controlled man, the man of good taste, the companion of learning, the man wholly devoted to God: a man such as Gerontius is. You have the man, then, along with the letter; once you have come to know him, you will say I am no poor praiser.

It is not because the admirable Gerontius is a relative of my children that I recommend the young man to your friendship (though that too counts), but because he suits the manners of golden Chrysus, if I may say something frigid and Gorgianic. But it is truer than anything to say that you dwell within every virtue, and that the man who hands you this letter is most worthy to enjoy your company.

The length of a letter is a charge of unfamiliarity against its bearer. But the admirable Gerontius knows all that I know; and if he were not averse to falsehood, he would tell even more than he knows, because he loves me and has a tongue equal to his mind. Whomever you see with pleasure, you have seen as I wish …

Receive, with the living letter, the lifeless one too: with the admirable Gerontius, these lines, written more by custom than from need, to greet you. For that we live with the memory of you, the young man will tell far more loudly than letters from outside.

I have entrusted the admirable Gerontius with a letter to your sacred and thrice-longed-for head, to provide a pretext for a first meeting. At first you will perhaps honour him for my sake; but once you have made trial of him, you will honour someone else for his sake.

The man to whom I have given this letter is paymaster and grain-distributor of the Dalmatian unit. I honour all the Dalmatians as much as my own sons, for they are townsfolk of the city that fell to my lot. That was all I had to tell you. It is for you to treat what is mine as your own.

When I received the spring letters from Thrace, I rummaged through the bundle to see whether one bore the famous name of Pylaemenes as its address, for I did not think it right to read any other paper first. But there was none anywhere. If, then, you happen to be abroad, may you return quickly and well. But if you were at home when all your acquaintances were giving their letters to Zosimus, this would be the strange thing, if … about …

For a while we fared well. Then, as if a current had turned back against us, both public and private affairs give me grief. For I live, not as a private person, in a country at war; I must always weep over each man's misfortune, and many times a month leap up onto the battlements, as one hired to fight alongside, not to pray. Of three sons, one is still left to me. But if you are sailing with a fair wind and living pleasantly, fortune is not grieving us in everything.

Justice has departed from among men. Andronicus formerly did wrong, and now he is wronged. But the character of the Church is such as to exalt the humble and to humble the exalted. This Andronicus she hated for what he did (that is why she cast him off, until he came to this point); but now she pities him for what he has now met with beyond the curse; since for his sake we have even grieved those who are now in power. But it would be dreadful if we never stood with the prosperous and always wept with those who weep. Here, then, we rescued him from a grim tribunal, and in other respects made his misfortunes far smaller. And if your piety thinks him worthy of care, I shall take this as the greatest proof that the man has not been wholly given up by God.

Formerly I kept my dealings with my friends, whether in person or by letter, more free of business. For I lived among books, in a way enrolled in no city and no state. But now, since God has commanded me to live in an appointed place, to hold some rank myself in the city, and to live among men who are counted, I would like to be of use to those who fell to my lot with me, and to do what good I can, both to each privately and to the city in common, so that I may see and be seen with pleasure by those who are, so to speak, my fellow-voyagers in life. If, then, Martyrius gains anything from the letter written for his sake, know that you have done me a favour in a man who spends his days with me, and, by my eloquence and yours, … who often spends much time with me, taking even part of the night.

Know well that, even at the farthest edge of Libya, I shall reap the small evil of rusticity, being all too truthful in the disposition of my manners.

… that, though a lover of political power beyond anyone of his time, he renounced every office in which his acquaintances would have no more than strangers. That the times recognized your virtue, and that through you the name of an office and a new institution came into the state, pleased me, as is natural for friends of long standing, whom sacred geometry betrothed to each other. But that you think fit to count my brother too among the councillors, and do not erase the family from the wicked register, even if something of the kind had happened earlier through an old misfortune: this, I say, you do not do in the manner of Themistocles, nor as seems right to divine geometry. For Euoptius ought to have been ranked among your brothers, if things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another. But if the duty has been neglected until now because of the din of the affairs pouring round you, show what you are, admirable friend; take this letter and release his mother-in-law from the absurd penalty, both for the future and for the past. And give me back my brother. Whether it is for this very reason that he is abroad, God knows; but to me, who greatly need consolation in my many misfortunes, of which you are not unaware, he offers no other excuse.

Recently, before I had heard the grievous news from Cyrene, I was intending to send the message to Teuchira as quickly as possible, when someone came announcing that the general already [held] the heights of the country … the reward of your zeal from God, both now and hereafter. I have now sent to praise these very things and to learn how you are; and may you be in all good things. For I care, I care for the Pentapolis too (how could I not?), our 'motherland', as the Cretans would say; and not least for you and your glory. For at each of your successes everyone thinks it right to rejoice with me. Since, then, I am judged in you, best of men and of generals, I have a right to know your affairs. I urged John as best I could to be a good man; and he is in any case no faint-hearted soldier, if God favours him. Give him a hand for his brother's sake, who will serve you in place of many. This seems to me the best plan, since I know the natures of the young men and how much regard they have for each other. If it seems so to you too, let it stand. Greet those of my friends who are serving. Let my foster-brother come back quickly, bringing some fine story of war; though he is most cowardly, he ventured on the road because your arms were in front. Give Cyrene the pair of brothers; for they will fight for the land that bore and nurtures them.

That you consider us obedient to your commands (for so you wrote), you do well, and think justly of us; and may many good things come to you for this. We acknowledge the favour, if indeed any favour is owed by an elder brother to a younger for obeying him, which I do not think. But it is return enough for us that you are not ignorant of our resolve: that we are devoted to you alone of the living. But when you say you know clearly that Julius holds our friendship in his prayers, this is no longer worth accepting; for it is all too much the mark of a man deceived, not, I would say, of one deceiving. For at the same moment I was reading the letter from you, and someone else the letter from him; and you say this, he the opposite; and people say they have read and heard that he talks of us in unsuitable terms. Now I could not disbelieve a man of honour; and, believing him, by the god of our kin, mine and yours, I did not regret the good I had done the man, when on the very day before I had by force got rid of the accuser who was prosecuting him for impiety, as having wronged the emperor's hearth. For, by your sacred head, unless I had withstood the frequent attempts, on the one hand the cowardice of the judge, who would not admit a change of mind in a case of this kind, and on the other the desperation of the accuser, who pretended to be under compulsion but was eager to do some harm and …

I call to witness God, whom philosophy and friendship alike revere: I would have chosen many deaths instead of the priesthood. But since God brought upon me not what I asked but what he willed, I pray that he who has become …

Reading the letter in which you told me of your illness, I was frightened as I began and took heart again as I finished; for after threatening danger you announced better news. Of the things you asked to have sent or brought by us, all that are possible will certainly be sent or brought. Which of them are possible and which are not, it is superfluous to write. For … do not set out before we have met each other. And if God …, you will meet many better than Synesius, but none who love you more.

To the same. How do you think I, who was thirsting, let my soul spread out over your most delightful letters? They brought me to a manifold better disposition, and I expect before long to see Alexandria, which still holds the dear head. For by the good you did Secundus you honoured us; and by writing as you do you honour us; you have bound us to yourself and made us yours; so much so that we, who are of those who walk on the ground, do not recognize our own worth, being honoured doubly, both by the greatness of what is written and by the zeal of what was done. To my lord the Count I have written many times already; but since in your letters sent through the boy you blame me for not having written to him, I have entrusted a letter also to my lord brother, … who has as much care for philosophy as befits one who with …

… I have written, scarcely bearing to arrange the composition of the letter. Pray for the best for us, whatever God may judge best. If I set sail, to Alexandria …

This is a new way of using letters that I am practising. For I have not written to recommend the bearer of the letter to your friendship, but to make you a present of the man, a gain that will be no small one for you and for the great Diogenes, your darling. And do not be vexed if I judge, and say, that it is not you who are a gain for Theotimus, but Theotimus for you. That would be so if a poet, the most inspired man of our time, needed power; but it is someone who needs power … who needs poetry, so that he may be glorious to those who come after, and not escape the notice of the absent. For great deeds, if they do not meet with words to herald them, flow out of memory and wrap themselves in oblivion, having flourished only at the very moment of their doing, among those who saw them. In this way, then, you should honour the windfall, and be zealous for it above everything, even apart from any need. For out of reverence for the Muses it is right to cherish their priests, and not to rank them second. And there is a third reason for your honouring the man: Synesius admires everything in him for which men praise men and call them blessed. Farewell, and live in health, honoured by me in all things. All who live in the same house with us greet your sacred disposition, and above all your Ision; and we greet those with you, especially my Abramius. Whether to give the Count what I have written, you yourself will judge.

This is that Anastasius of whom we so often spoke. And if I had shown you to him, I would have spoken the same praise of you. Since, then, you met long ago in me, and have made your encounter a recognition, greet each other warmly, and consider together how you may do me some good. Leisure is the greatest good, which, one might say, like an all-bearing land, bears every fine thing for the soul of the philosopher. I shall reap leisure if I can be released from being enrolled in the service of the Roman state. This will come about if I am freed from the accursed public duty; so far as the emperor is concerned I am already outside it, but I could justly blame myself, if I were ashamed to profit from my own efforts. I shall therefore make my own defence. For I shall seem …

Phrycus handed me a letter bearing your name as its address. I read it with pleasure and also with admiration: the pleasure was owed to the disposition of your soul, the admiration to the beauty of your language. And indeed I prepared for you a Greek theatre in Libya, announcing that people should come to hear distinguished writing. And now in our cities Pylaemenes … One thing seemed strange and met the theatre against expectation: you asked for my 'Hunting' pieces, as though there were something serious in them. You seemed, then, to show a mocking character, full of irony; for they did not think it right that you should call the most trivial of their own things worthy of your seriousness, when you brought forward a mere plaything. But I begged you off from this charge of irony, and taught them that, besides the other goods you have, you are most humane and most generous with praise; so that the request was not made in mockery, but so that I might be pleased, honoured by the testimony of such a man. Write, then, as often as you can, and feast the Cyrenaeans with eloquence; for no reading would be sweeter to them than the letters of Pylaemenes, now that they are captivated by the sample. You will surely meet many of those who come here; if no others, then those who are to govern us, in the lesser office, the greater, and the government of Egypt, whom you are not likely to miss, because of the train of creditors that follows them. And since it matters to you to know my affairs: we pursue philosophy, my admirable friend, with solitude as a good fellow-worker, and no human being. Nor have I ever heard anyone in Libya utter a philosophic word, except the echo answering us back. But 'adorn the Sparta that fell to your lot', he says. And I think I shall love and adorn my own fate, considering that this contest and test is set before my life, whether I do not abandon philosophy even when she is unfortunate. For if no one else bears me witness, God himself certainly does, from whom mind came to men as a seed. And I think the stars too look kindly upon me each time, the only one in a wide continent whom they see becoming their observer with knowledge. Pray with us, then, that we may be content in our circumstances; and for yourself, to leave …

I commend to your friendship and your protection the … for whom, having grown up …, the gifts of fortune do not come in proportion …

No, by the god of friendship, mine and yours, I did not, Pylaemenes, mock your goodwill toward the land that bore you. I am not so much a man without a city or a hearth. But you took the meaning of my letter wrongly, and accused us of things that do not deserve it. For that you love Heraclea and are eager to do the city some good, I praise. What I was saying was that by pursuing philosophy you would be of more use to your fatherland. How so? Because you blamed your patriotic disposition for keeping you from changing your choice of life. That is what I mocked, and not your goodwill, since you wrongly think that attending the law courts will do you any good toward this fine love of yours. For I would [not] say that philosophy is sufficient to set cities right … if you wish, both an art and a science, since, being above all others, it makes its possessor more useful to the individual, to the household, and to cities. Yet it is not enough of itself to do men good. For it has only what belongs to the soul, and, as it were, only the one who uses it; but occasions and fortunes carry the affairs of cities up and down. Now they are thus, now otherwise, by the necessity of the nature they share. You, then, are a lover of your city, and so in fact am I. And you practise rhetoric; and I grant you that you should not practise this kind, but the right and noble kind, which not even Plato, I think, attempts to describe. But I honour philosophy and prefer it to all human goods. What more, then, do cities get from us by it, unless certain lives also serve, adequate to their purposes? For there is need of suitable material; there is need …

You could see the same men bold in peace and cowardly in war, that is to say, wicked everywhere. So it seems to me that one might justly be grateful to war for this, that it is a test of the blood around the heart … and renders them to us … For not, I think, … Yesterday, I tell you, the proverb was most brilliantly borne out, or rather the oracle; for it is plainly an oracle. You surely know this one: 'No long-haired man but is a fop.' For several days in succession the enemy were reported; I thought we must go out to meet them, and the phylarch led out the Balagritae in good order. We reached the plain first and waited. When the enemy nowhere appeared, about the time of unyoking the oxen we each went home, having agreed to come again the next day. Meanwhile John the Phrygian was nowhere, not, at least, so as to be seen; but he kept sending rumours: now that he had broken his leg and it was being sawn off, now that he was ill with asthma, now that he had some other extraordinary ailment. Tale-bearers of this kind kept coming, each claiming to come from a different place, so that it was not even clear in what corner of the earth John had sunk or was hiding. And in the midst of their stories they would complain of the untimeliness of the misfortune and shed tears: 'Now was the time for his noble spirit, now for those hands of his! What would he have done! What would have happened!' And at the end of it all each would say, 'O cruel fortune!', strike his hands together, and go off. These were men he had long kept about him as hangers-on for no useful purpose, long-haired these too and nothing sound in them, 'robbers of lambs and kids among their own people'; and, by the gods, in some places of women too. Such were the comrades he had long prepared for himself, with whom … To be a man he does not even attempt, for that is hard; but he is a sophist, and he considers excellently how he might show himself a man before men who really are men.

But it seems to me that heaven fittingly worked against him. For it was already the fifth time that we had gone out in arms in vain …; and he, despairing altogether that the enemy would come, since they would not dare the depth of the country, appeared, and at once filled everything with disorder. Of illness he made no mention; in fact he laughed at those who had been willing to listen to such talk. He said he had come from far off, I know not where; that he had been called there as an ally, and that this was why the estates which had invoked him had been saved, for the enemy had not even invaded, at the rumour of John's presence … and that in a short time he would hand on an art of victory: … the deep wing, the square, making up names of formations whose use he did not know. And to some he seemed from this to be somebody, and they called his nature blessed … the moment for attack. And indeed, coming down from the mountains, as many as could be seen by their heads, they came toward us at a run and hurried to get within our lines … Before that we could also hear them clearly, saying that, being generalled, as it seemed to me, by hunger, they were most ready to die for our goods. When they saw us and were seen, before coming within bowshot, some of them dismounted … and it seemed to me well to imitate the men, for the ground was unsuited to horses. But the noble fellow would not [get down] from his horse. What then? Wheeling round by force, using every spur, with the whip falling thick, … the shout of command came. And here it is not easy to say whom one would praise more, the horse or the rider. The one was carried alike down slopes and up steep places, through thickets and over bare ground; at one bound he leapt ditches and rose over banks. The other kept his seat over all the terrain, and nowhere slipped from the saddle. It must, I think, have been a fine sight for the enemy too, and they would pray to see many such …

I would be a fool not to be very grateful to the people of Ptolemais for thinking me worthy of things of which I do not think myself worthy. But what one should consider is not whether they are bestowing great things, but whether it is possible for me to receive them. For when a man is worthy, to obtain honour is most pleasant to enjoy; but when he falls far short of the dignity, it leaves him a bitter expectation of the future. For the fear is not a new one, but very ancient: 'lest, having sinned against God, I win honour from men.' And examining myself, I find myself altogether too deficient to match the majesty of the priesthood. So I will talk with you about the movements of my own soul; for I have no one else to whom I could, in place of your dear head, the companion of my upbringing. It is right that you should share the same cares with me, lie awake at night and consider by day how some good may come to me, and how … to be; I who am inclined to every amusement … and you would know most of these things even better. Having taken up a small burden, I think I have carried it well up to now: philosophy. But because I seemed not to fail in it altogether, and was praised by some, I am thought worthy of greater things by people who do not know how to judge the fitness of a soul. And I fear that, if I grow conceited and accept the honour, I may miss both: neglecting the one and not attaining the dignity of the other. For consider it this way. I always divide my time between these two, amusement and seriousness. When I am serious I keep to myself, especially in divine things; when I am amusing myself, I am the most sociable of men. For you know that when I look up from my books I am inclined to every kind of amusement. In political care I have no part, either by nature or by practice. But the priest must be a godlike man, unbending, who is watched by ten thousand eyes so that he may keep to his role; and they are of little or no use unless a man is constituted grave and proof against every relaxation. In what concerns God he will be not private but most public, since he is a teacher of the law and must utter what is established. And he must also transact business, as much as all the others together; for he alone must do the business of all, or be liable to every charge. How, then, would it not take a great and most excellent soul to bear such a mass of cares without flooding the mind, and without letting the divine portion be quenched in the soul, when so many kinds of pursuits draw him away? I know well that this is possible for some, and I count their natures blessed, and consider them truly divine men, whom much dealing with human affairs does not cut off from the divine. But I know myself: going down into the city and coming up from the city, and wrapped up in the things that drag me toward the earthly, and filled with more stain than anyone could say. For since the defilements of long ago are mine already, any small part added contributes a great deal as an addition. I have no strength; what is within is not sound; I am not able to cope with what is outside; and I am very far from being able to bear the pain of conscience. And as often as anyone asks me, I do not hesitate to say plainly that the priest must be spotless in all things by a wide margin, as one who washes others clean of their defilements.

This too must be added to the letter to my brother. Many people will surely read this letter; for I dictated it not least for this purpose, to make the matter plain to all, fearing as I do, so that whatever comes of it I may be blameless before God and before men, and not least before father Theophilus. For when I set my affairs openly before him and give him everything to deliberate about us, how could I be blamed? To me, then, God and the law and the sacred hand of Theophilus have given a wife. I therefore declare to all and call them to witness that I will neither be wholly separated from her, nor live with her secretly like an adulterer; for the one is not at all pious, the other not at all lawful. But I shall wish and pray to have many good children. This is one thing that the lord of the ordination must not be ignorant of; let him learn it from my friend Paul and from Dionysius, whom I learn the people have chosen as envoys. The other thing he need not learn, but only be reminded of; but I will speak more fully about it, for one would count all the rest small beside this one thing. It is difficult, if not altogether impossible, for doctrines that have entered the soul through knowledge, up to demonstration, to be shaken. And you know that philosophy is opposed to many of these much-talked-of doctrines. Certainly I shall never think it right to consider the soul later-born than the body. I will not say that the world and its other parts perish together. The resurrection that is so much talked of I consider something sacred and ineffable, and I am far from agreeing with the notions of the multitude. A philosophic mind, being a beholder of the truth, makes allowance for the need of falsehood. For as light is to truth, so is the eye to the people. As the eye would be harmed by enjoying unlimited light, and as darkness is more beneficial to those with diseased eyes, so I hold falsehood to be beneficial to the people, and the truth harmful to those who are not strong enough to gaze at the clarity of what is.

I asked the boy about the silphium, whether it came to you from your own farming, or whether you received it as a gift and set aside a share for me too. And when I learned that the garden you take such pains over had produced this crop as well as everything else, I was doubly pleased, both by the beauty of the plant and by the fame of the place. May you enjoy your all-bearing estate; may you never tire of watering your dearest beds, nor they ever give up their bearing, so that you may both use them yourself and send us all that the seasons bring.

To the same. You are charming, forbidding us to provide ourselves with weapons, when the enemy are upon us and making plunder of everything, and there are no soldiers, not so much as to be seen. Will you say, then, that it is not lawful for private persons to bear arms, but lawful for them to die, if the state is to be angry with a man who tries to save himself? But if I gain nothing else, at least I shall gain this: that the laws become supreme instead of these accursed men. And how highly do you think I value this, to see peace again, and the tribunal … and, if I were dead, to enjoy the first form of my fatherland …

I now have three hundred spears and as many cleavers; of double-edged swords there were not more than ten even before, for these very long iron blades are not forged among us. But I think … we shall use these. If need be, we shall have clubs too; the wild olives here are good. Some of us also have single-edged axes, each man at his belt, with which … having [these] as a shield of arms. The battle, as one may guess, will be tomorrow. For some of the enemy fell in with our scouts first and pursued them hard; and when they saw that our men were too strong to be caught, they told them to bring us the pleasantest news: that we would no longer need to wander about looking for men who sink into the breadth of the continent. For they said they would stay where they were, and wished to learn who we were, that we dared to tear ourselves so many days' journey from our land to engage warlike men who live a nomadic life, and have arranged their civil affairs as we arrange our military ones. So, as one who will tomorrow, with God, conquer the enemy, and, if need be, conquer them again (for may I utter nothing ill-omened), I charge you with the care of the children. It befits you, as their uncle, to remember the debt of kindness toward them.

I have neither ass, nor mule, nor horse; all have been let out to pasture; otherwise I would have used one to come to you, my dearest head. I would very much have liked to walk, and perhaps I could have; but my relatives said I must not, lest we become a source of amusement to those who met us. For they think these people, whoever they are, so very wise, and to have so much sense, that each of them could judge better than I what befits me. On so many judges do they make us depend, these people who compel us to live for the opinion of outsiders. And they prevailed, not by advising, but in the more forceful way: when I was setting out, they would not let me go, but took hold of my cloak. What remains, then, but to send the letter to you in my place? Through it I greet you and ask what news has come from Ptolemais, the fresh stories you are likely to bring from the general's headquarters; and above all, what is the much-talked-of secret from the West. For you know that it matters a great deal to me whether it happened so or not. If, then, you send a letter that tells each thing clearly, I shall stay where I am; if not, you too will blame me for the journey.

Cheilas the brothel-keeper, who is not likely to be unknown to many, because of the brilliance his trade has won him. For the mime Andromache, who flowered as the most beautiful of women in our time, belonged to his troupe. Having grown old in such fine pursuits, he thought it fitting to crown his past career with … He has lately come from the emperor, having obtained the command of the most noble Marcomanni, who were likely enough good soldiers before, and now that they have met with a fitting general will display some great and noble deed. He said, at any rate, when he met Syrianus (you know the physician from the neighbourhood), and Syrianus reported it to us, in what state he had left the sacred camp. The rest, what need is there to write to you, which I too heard only in passing? But what I myself was exceedingly pleased to hear, and want you to be gladdened by, is this. The admirable John, to put it briefly, is in the same position, fortune advancing his affairs as far as advancement can go and finding some excess of her own besides. For the emperor's ears are open to him, and before them his mind, to use for whatever he needs. And whatever Antiochus can do, this man can do; and Antiochus can do whatever he wishes. Do not think this is the Antiochus of Gratian's time, that sacred little man, excellent in character but very ugly to look at; it is another, the young man with the hollow belly, who held power beside Narses the Persian. Fortune has been making him great from then until now. This being so, it is likely that the most just governor will rule among us for a crow's lifetime, being related to the one and having become intimate with the other.

… fifty lines each day. He gives them back without stumbling, without repeating himself, without stopping to collect his memory over time; but once he begins to speak, he runs on continuously, and silence is the end of the recitation.

People do not love and praise for the same reasons, nor is one power of the soul assigned to both. By the part subject to feeling we are drawn to others or estranged from them; by the part of the soul that can judge and possesses reason, we praise and blame.

Shall we see these wretches willing to die for what belongs to others, whatever plunder they have gathered, so as not to give it back to its owners, while we, for our land, for our sanctuaries, for our laws, for property which time has made familiar to us, will not spare ourselves, but cling to our lives? Then we shall not seem to be men. I, at any rate, must go against them …

And then you wonder, living in parched Phycus, that you shiver and have spoiled your blood? On the contrary, one should wonder if your body is a match for the heat there. But you can come to us, with God, and be better, once you are rid of … salty, lukewarm water, and, in a word, stagnant water, which is the same as saying dead. And what is so fine about lying on the beach sand, which is your only pastime? For where else will you turn? Here, how pleasant it is to go under the shade of a tree; and if you are not satisfied, you may change from tree to tree, and from grove to grove. How pleasant to cross the little stream that trickles by! How sweetly the west wind gently stirs the branches! Varied are the songs of the birds, the colours of the flowers, the shrubs of the meadow, some the work of farming, others the gifts of nature; all fragrant, the juices of a healthy earth. The cave of the Nymphs I will not praise; that needs a Theocritus. And there is something besides all this.

Eating little is a necessary good. Someone else might mock it, but that is not right for you, who boast of Hippocrates, who in his aphorisms said that want is the mother of health.

'Onto a mountain, or into the wave of the loud-roaring sea': so Homer sends off the evils that come from contention. Philosophy does not even give them entry into the soul at all. But I, for my part, am too weak to be a philosopher; yet we do not think fit to be altogether worse than soldiers, …

If you know the hero Maximinus (for he spent quite a long time at court), you surely know too that he was a good man. His son, my second cousin, will hand you this letter. Someone else might perhaps honour him even for his fortune, for among those who have governed it is no undistinguished office. But the philosopher Troilus will see into the inner man of the youth, and praise him from there. It is clear that you will also help him bear his present troubles; for he is being torn apart by informers who have grown like a cancer on Cyrene, 'unless you put on your strength'. For whatever you persuade Anthemius, or anyone of his rank, to say on our behalf and on behalf of the truth will surely be yours, and you will have the credit for what is done. Through one man and one case, then, I beg you, be eager to rid us of these utterly wicked beasts. For if the attempt succeeds for those who started it, it will encourage many to become like them.

Whatever you do for Diogenes, of the things your nature is to do, you will have done nothing new, but will be building on what is your own. For he is a Cyrenean, of the city that still stands because of you. And one must do good not only to people in a body but also one by one. In what matters Diogenes will need friends, you should not read in my letter but hear from his own telling; for nothing could be more eloquent than the one who has suffered. Greet from me Marcianus the philosopher, who governed the Paphlagonians. And if he can (and I guess that he can), let him prevent a close relative of mine, my first cousin, from becoming the prey of sycophant informers, the common curses of the country; whose son I entrust to you with this letter, because of whom, being two brothers, three …

… they give them to sip, so that with this they may draw out also what was stored up before. I too want to send you rumours, so that you may give them back to me many times over, adding whatever more you happen to know.

Odysseus was trying to persuade Polyphemus to let him out of the cave. 'For I am a wizard,' he said, 'and could be of use to you at the right moment, since you are not fortunate in your love for the sea-nymph. I know incantations and binding spells and love-compulsions, which Galatea is not likely to resist even for a short while. Only undertake to move the door, or rather this door-stone; to me it looks like a mountain peak. I will come back to you quicker than words, having worked on the girl. Worked on, do I say? I will show you that very girl brought here by many charms; she will beg you and entreat you, and you will play coy and make fun of her. But meanwhile something of this sort has troubled me: that the smell of the fleeces may be unpleasant to a girl who lives in luxury and bathes many times a day. It would be good, then, to put everything in order and sweep the place out; better still, to prepare garlands and crown your darling. But why do you delay? Why not set your hand to the door already?' At this Polyphemus laughed as loud as he could and clapped his hands. Odysseus thought that he did not know what to do with himself for joy, hoping to win his darling. But Polyphemus chucked him under the chin and said, 'Nobody, you seem to be a very shrewd little fellow, well rubbed in affairs. But embroider something else; from here you will not escape.' Odysseus, then (for he was truly wronged), was going to profit from his villainy after all. But you, a Cyclops in daring and a Sisyphus in your attempts, have been pursued by justice and shut up by the law; may you never laugh at them. If you must in any case be above the laws, at least may I not be the one who sets you free and breaks down the doors of the prison. For if the state were in the hands of the priests, they ought to be the punishers of wickedness, since the public sword is no less a means of purification. So we learn of the famous men of former times. So they did, as long as it seemed good for the same man both to pray for the common good and to act so that it might come about. For both the Egyptians and the Hebrew race were ruled for a long time by priests. But since the two lives have been separated, and the one declared sacred, the other a ruler's, and others are appointed to be in affairs, while we are appointed to be in prayers, we to whom the law forbids to lend a hand to justice and to put to death even the most wicked: how could anyone allow us to lend a hand to a villain against justice? But I, for my part, do everything: I pray both at home and in the common sanctuaries that justice may prevail over injustice and the city be purged of wickedness. And that is the same as you, and anyone else like you, coming to a bad end. Let this be a proof to you of what I would have been if I could do anything, I who, since it is not permitted, …

Many good things befall the priests of the Axomitae! When the soldiers had sunk into holes in the mountains and thought it right to guard their own blood, these priests summoned the country people and led them straight from the churches against the enemy; and having prayed, they set up a trophy in the Myrsinitis. This is a long, deep ravine, thickly wooded; but because no hostile arms had met the barbarians, they had grown bold enough even for difficult ground. And it seems they were to meet a 'black-bottomed' hero in Faustus, the deacon of the church. He was the first to stand up unarmed to a man in armour; he struck him on the temple with a stone held in his hand, not throwing it but leaping on him like a boxer. When the man fell, Faustus stripped him of his arms and with them slew many. And whoever else proved a brave man at that time, Faustus must be credited with what happened, both for what he did and for what he said at the right moment. I would most gladly crown and proclaim all who took part in the deed. For they were the first to set their hand to noble deeds, and to show those who were terrified that the enemy are not Corybantes, nor any of the spirits around Rhea, but men, who can be wounded and are mortal, as we are. And if we too prove men in such things, not even the second prize would be without honour. Perhaps we might even be granted the first, if, lying in ambush in a ravine, fifty …

'Even if in the house of Hades they forget the dead, yet even there I shall remember my dear comrade.' The lines were composed by Homer; but I do not know whether their sense was more fitting for Achilles to speak about Patroclus, or for me about you, my dearest and most beneficent head. I call to witness God, whom philosophy reveres, that I carry the image of your sacred and sweet soul in the middle of my heart, and the wonderful echo of your wise words booms in my ears. When I came home to my fatherland from Egypt and read the letters of two years all at once, you cannot imagine how many tears I shed over them. For I did not rejoice in what I enjoyed of you through the writing, but was grieved, as the writing brought back to me your living company, the company of such a friend, and indeed a father, who willingly lives for his fatherland; so that I might again have a pretext for travel. Shall I ever see you, truly most genuine Father? Shall I ever embrace your sacred head? Shall I share again in the gathering made blessed through you? If I am granted these things, I will show that the story of Aeson the Thessalian, whom the poems say grew young twice, is no longer a myth …

'Even if in the house of Hades they forget the dead', yet even there I shall remember dear Hypatia. I, at any rate, beset by the sufferings of my fatherland, and vexed with it because every day I see enemy arms and men slaughtered like sacrificial victims, and breathe air corrupted by the rotting of bodies, and expect to suffer the same myself (for who can be hopeful where even the air around is most gloomy, darkened by the shadow of carrion birds?), yet even so I cling to the place. For what am I to do, being a Libyan, born here, and seeing the tombs of my ancestors not without honour? Only for your sake, I think, would I overlook my fatherland, if I could find leisure …

To his brother. We are unfortunate in that we have only wicked news to exchange with each other. For look: they have burned Battia and the threshing floors, ravaged the land, and enslaved the women; and the males they do not spare at all. … But now, I think, they know they are too few to assign many guards to the booty and still have enough left for war, if anyone should march out against them. Yet none of us is indignant; we sit at home …, and we have on our lips the soldiers' rations and their profits in time of peace, as if we needed to go to law with them, not to defend ourselves against the enemy. Shall we not stop talking nonsense? Shall we not come to our senses at last and arm the farmers against the enemy, for our children, for our wives, for our land, and, if you like, even for the soldiers themselves? For it is fine in peacetime to boast that we feed and save them. I, for my part, … For I have formed companies and captains from those at hand, … and a large number is gathering for me at Asusamas too; for the Soestae are coming to meet us. And I hope that once we are on the road, and the report goes round that a youthful force has gathered about me, many more will come uninvited. For the best men will come from everywhere to share in a noble deed; and the most wicked, …

Alas! But why 'alas'? We have suffered what mortals suffer. The third and last of my sons is gone. But the doctrine that nothing outside our control is either good or evil is still kept by me. Rather, long ago it was a lesson learned; now it has become the conviction of a soul exercised by circumstances. It seems the onset of the grief had to be harder for me; and for this reason the spirit whose concern is to harm my affairs arranged beforehand that you, dear head, should not be with me. But may you come some day, admirable, thrice-longed-for, most guileless of friends. The admirable Menelaus is my witness of my disposition toward you; for this reason I often gladly spent the day with him, because he spoke of you in words of praise … he was grateful to the great Asclepiodotus, and has continued thanking him as a benefactor for the greatest favours. So that we may have cold water, I am looking for a jar or a cask of marble: the larger, the better. It will stand in the shrine of Asclepius by the river; beside it …

'Asp, toad, snake' … flee … But after the most gentle and philosophic Pentadius, the tablets which the state makes the token of the Egyptian prefecture have been received and are held by Euthalius of Laodicea. You know the young man, as one may guess, since he spent time at court at the same period as we did; for neither his character nor his nickname let him go unnoticed. You used to hear of a certain 'Ballantas', who did not inherit this august name from his father but acquired it himself. For when, I believe, he had been appointed governor of Lydia in the time of Rufinus, and was plundering the Lydians, Rufinus was indignant and pursued him with a fine of fifteen pounds of gold; and he assigned soldiers from among his attendants, the bravest and most loyal, as he thought, to exact the gold by force and bring it faithfully to his own treasury. What, then, did our Sisyphus do in answer? 'Let me not be too unrefined': the famous purses! He had two made, more like each other than the horses of Eumelus, and into one he put bronze obols, into the other gold staters. He showed the one and hid the other; and when they had counted the gold, weighed it, and sealed it with the public seal, he secretly substituted the other purse, and sent obols in place of the staters. And they had acknowledged in public documents that they had received the gold and would deliver it. 'From that time Daphnis was first among the shepherds.' This raised Euthalius to great fortune. For laughter allowed no one to be indignant on behalf of the state; they wanted instead to see him as a wonder-worker beyond any who had ever lived, and he was summoned and went, as it were, from city to city. I know the little fellow to be more talkative than a cicada. He is just about to relieve my friend Pentadius of his office.

To a bishop driven from his see, who wished to join the party of Arius. You have not lost what you lost. For when someone is separated from the roll of impiety, he is not then deprived of the thrones of piety. Embrace your estrangement from Egypt, and think that the prophet has cried aloud to you too: 'What …

Plato represents Socrates as coming late to his beloved and asking him not to be surprised if, 'as I was slow to begin, so I may be slow to stop'. I think I have had the same experience with you, and have a right to ask the same pardon. For a whole year I held back (it is neither fitting nor true to say so, for I sent the letters in vain, since they came back into my hands again); now, then, I send them all together. With them I am not only talking at length, as if paying arrears of tribute, but I also want to add something. And yet, by the god of friendship, mine and yours, I went down to the sea, and on horseback, for this very purpose, to send you both a letter and a gift; but it is not worth listing what was sent for Pylaemenes to receive and was put ashore at Alexandria because of that most unlucky voyage. On your account (though of my friends there Pylaemenes is the dearest to me), by your honoured disposition, I would have borne the loss more easily than on account of many others, and especially the admirable Proclus and Tryphon, the only ones whom you wrote of as greeting me. I have sent, then, to your honoured disposition ten gold coins, and to my friend Proclus, in the manner of the divine Hesiod, a third more than I had from him. For it is like this: when I was abroad I received from him, for the voyage home, as I needed it, sixty gold pieces. He had written them down as seventy; I have sent eighty. And there would have been many more, if the first letters had reached you, and the ship with the cargo of that time. But now I, trusting to fortune, went abroad to Alexandria, intending the boat to put in at your harbours; but, without my knowing it, it was driven by off-shore winds from Crete and barely reached safety in the Egyptian sea. Or what prevented you from keeping land ostriches, as you keep hens? It is right that the note should be returned to my people by the most admirable Father Proclus when he receives the eighty gold pieces …

[Next letter, heading lost] You did Cerealius a favour by greeting us through him: namely, that he escaped notice for five days as a wicked man. For the cities hoped for something good from a man whom Simplicius did not disdain to know. But very quickly he disgraced, not you (may your affairs never depend on another), but himself and his office and, not to waste time, the affairs of the Romans: a man to be bought for the smallest price, careless of reputation, unwarlike, oppressive in peace, which he enjoyed only a very short time. For he needed no time to overturn and confound everything. As if there were a law that the soldiers' property belongs to the generals, he took what all of them had and gave them in exchange freedom from service and from enrolment, letting them go wherever each thought he could feed himself. Having done this to the local troops, since he could not extract money from the foreign ones, he extracted it from the cities themselves, moving and transferring garrisons not where it was more useful but where it was more profitable; for the cities, burdened by their garrisons, paid gold to have them removed. The Macetae quickly perceived this, and the report passed from the half-barbarians to the barbarians: 'then they came, as many as the leaves and flowers that grow in spring.' Alas for the youth we have lost! Alas for the crops we hoped for in vain! We sowed for the enemy's fire. For most of us, wealth lay in herds, in camels at pasture, in horses … carried away by my feelings. But I write, often seeing beacons in a single hour, and lighting them myself, and raising signals to the others. Hunting I gave up … which we formerly enjoyed freely, not least because of you; everything is gone. And we groan, remembering that youth, and that mind and spirit; and the enemy now hold the country. I … I do not know whether these words were not more fitting for Archilochus. May Cerealius perish evilly, if he has not perished before the curse; he deserved to be the work of last winter's storm. When he saw the country he had brought into danger, he lost all trust in the land, put his gold on board sailing ships, and rides at anchor out at sea. A light boat brings his letters, which we do indeed obey: they command us to stay within the walls, that no one leap beyond the ditches or engage men who cannot be fought; otherwise he protests that he is free of blame. He teaches us to set four watches in the night, as though our hopes lay in not sleeping. For he seems to be wise in such matters, being a man made for misfortune. And yet he did not even wish to share our misfortunes; for the general does not stand at the battlement, as I, Synesius the philosopher, do, but at the oar. If you love the poems you asked for (though we know of nothing good in them except their subject), pray with the Cyrenaeans that we may have a little respite from arms. For as things now are, it is not possible to dig books out of chests.

Consider the definitions of geometry most true, since the other sciences too may pride themselves when they borrow something from geometry, however little, for their proofs. There is among them a principle that things equal to the same thing must also be equal to one another. Now character has made you my friend, and nature the admirable Diogenes; and you are both friends of one man. You must, then, be attached to each other also, as through me in the middle. So I join you to each other through this letter, with which the admirable Diogenes will give himself to the friendship of your reverence; and he will, I know well, take hold of my Pylaemenes; for in calling you mine I would say I neither bring shame nor feel it. That through you he will also gain the other friends who love me, and those who have power will be useful to him too, I would be unjust to doubt; and he needs useful friends, if anyone ever did. His affairs, as briefly as possible, are these. He is young, simple and noble, spirited and gentle, such as Plato wants the guardians of his city to be. He served in the army while still quite a lad; and just out of the ranks of the ephebes he held the command of the troops among us, being compared before envious witnesses (for such are our citizens toward every success); but he proved himself superior even to envy.

That the women should cry out and beat their breasts when the enemy are reported might seem less dreadful; and yet Plato thinks even this dreadful, that they will not even, like birds fighting for their young, stand up to any of the most valiant beasts, but bring on the human race the reputation of being the most cowardly of all creatures. But that you too should make the same mistakes as they, and be terrified at night, and jump up and shout that a barbarian is standing at the very door of the fort (for someone reported such things about you): how can this be borne any longer? Things ought to be otherwise, if you are my brother; and then to be a coward? I, as soon as day breaks, ride out as far as I can, and with ears and eyes inquire into everything about these raiders. For it is not even worth calling them enemies, but robbers or clothes-snatchers or some such most petty name; they stand up to no one who attacks them vigorously, but slaughter only the terrified, like sacrificial victims, and strip them. At night …

Yesterday and the day before, under the recent consuls, one of whom is Aristaenetus, I received a letter bearing the name of your sacred head. I judge it to be very old, both because it has become thoroughly worm-eaten and because most of the letters are blurred. I would ask you not to send a letter once a year like a tribute, nor to make the dearest Syrus your only bearer; for so it comes about that we receive the letters not fresh but stale. Do as I do: no imperial courier changing a public horse leaves the city without letters for your eloquence forming part of the load behind him. If all of them, or some, deliver them, many good things befall those who deliver, for they are honest men; if not, in this too you are wiser, distrusting those who deserve it. But so that we may not tire the secretary in vain by dictating letters that will not be delivered, I ask to be told; for we will make other arrangements in future, and I shall trust Peter alone. This letter, at least, I think Peter will carry, having received it through the sacred hand. For I am sending it from the Pentapolis to our common teacher, and she will give it to whomever she wishes; and she will wish, I know well, to give it to the best known. For we do not even know, dearest and admirable friend, whether we may greet each other again. For through the wickedness of the generals the country has passed to the enemy without a battle, and only those of us live who have occupied the strongholds, while those caught in the plains have been slaughtered like sacrificial victims. And we fear their siege, lest, if it lasts long, it reduce many of the forts by thirst. That is why I have not answered your counter-charges about the gifts; for I have no leisure, my mind being on a certain engine. I am constructing one by which we may hurl stones of considerable weight from the towers as far as possible. At the same time I give you leave to send me gifts; for Synesius must yield to Olympius; but not luxurious gifts. For even then I found fault with the luxury of the lodgings at our common mess; let them be military: bows and arrows, and the arrows with their shafts. Bows I could buy elsewhere, and repair those I have; but arrows are not easy to get, at least not serviceable ones. For these Egyptian ones … and so they fail of themselves; they are like runners who are hampered and stumble at the very start. But yours are of good length, and have what is everything for a straight course of flight. Send me these, and good horse-bridles for use; for I would also very gladly see the Italian horse you praised with your fine tongue, since you promise him to us as the sire of good foals. But below in your letter, after the signature, I found that it was necessary to wait …

I received the letter in which you again blamed fortune, as having planned nothing kinder concerning you. Do not, dearest of companions; it is not right to accuse her, but to console. Since you are so placed, you can come to us; you will find a brother's house. We are not rich, my good friend, but what we have suffices for Pylaemenes as well as for me; and if you come, perhaps we shall even become rich. From equal resources others have more than a moderate fortune; but I am a bad manager. Still, my patrimony holds out even against the most thorough neglect, and it is able to feed a philosopher. Do not think it the same thing when forethought is added. So much on this; and do not do otherwise, unless in the meantime you have done something better and intend once again to raise up fallen Heraclea. I have not written letters to those I usually write to, because of the times; but recently I gave letters for all … Diogenes is mine. If, then, he found you in his search (for he searched, I know), he has handed over the bundle, for it was not addressed. If not, ask the ship's captain to show you the young man, take the letters, and give them to everyone yourself. There are some whom I particularly want greeted from me: father Proclus; Tryphon, who governed here; and Simplicius, a man and a good governor, and my friend. When you have given him the letter, make use of the man while he is there; for it is good to share leisure with a soldier who is a poet. We had large ostriches from our peacetime hunting; but it was not possible to send them to the sea through the enemy's arms, nor to put anything else on board of what is near the shore. So wine is the only cargo. Of oil, by your honoured head, they carry not even a ladle, at least so far as I know. Take, then, so many measures of wine; you will get them by handing over the order to Julius. It is attached to the letter, so that it may not go astray. I have also written to father Proclus and sent him the same. Let him receive the letter from you and the wine from Julius. For golden Tryphon (for one must say something frigid and Gorgianic in this too), for Tryphon we have prepared gifts: plenty of silphium juice (you have heard, I suppose, of the silphium of Battus) and the best saffron; for Cyrene is good at producing this too. … It was not possible to send them for the present; but we shall send them in another ship, when … and to you, along with it, the ostriches separately …

This Poemenius, who gives you the letter, was sent to us by Artabazacus, who held power here a little earlier, to take charge of all the estates in these parts of which he had become master. But in such a position he showed himself gentle and most moderate. And who else has used such an opportunity so? Yet no Libyan found Poemenius's power at that time burdensome. A great proof of it: he grieves the cities by leaving. You, then, for my sake …

May I have as much profit from Athens as you wish! For I think I have become wiser by a palm and a finger. … And it is possible, from there, to [learn] of divine wisdom … and at Cephisia and Phalerum. And may [the ship's captain who brought me here] perish evilly … present-day Athens has nothing august except the famous names of … the skin is left, a token of the creature that once was … and the Lyceum, and, by Zeus, the Painted Stoa, … no longer painted; for the proconsul took away the panels. … As for Athens, long ago the city was the hearth of the wise; but now it is the beekeepers who make it famous. So it is with that pair of Plutarchean sophists, who gather the young in the theatres not by the fame of their words but …

If Homer said that the gain of Odysseus's wandering was 'to see the cities of many men and learn their mind', and that though he put in not among cultivated men but among Laestrygonians and Cyclopes, surely poetry would have sung wonderfully of my journey and yours, which let us experience things that are disbelieved even when reported. For we have been eyewitnesses and hearers of the genuine guide to the mysteries of philosophy. And if human needs bind in affection those who have shared them, a divine law requires us, who have come together in mind, the best thing in us, to honour each other. I, then, having also enjoyed your bodily company, seem to see you though you are absent, as memory brings forward the image laid up by affection; and the wonderfully sweet echo of your sacred words booms in my ears. If you are not so disposed toward us, you do wrong; if you are, you do nothing great, for you are paying a debt of affection. But when I look to our fellowship in philosophy, and to that philosophy over which we pored so much together, then, as I reach this reasoning, I attribute our meeting to God as its arbiter. For it was from no lesser cause than a divine one that Synesius, who least of all makes the thing public, who is with very many people but keeps his meetings with them to human fellowship, and holds philosophy among the most ineffable of ineffable things, so readily uncovered himself and his treasures to a man who had given and received speech with him only briefly. Since, then, there has come to be one to whom I divulged what had till then been kept unpublished, and forgot the wise art of Proteus (for it was nothing else than to be with men not in a divine but in a civil fashion); since this has happened, not by my design but suddenly and unprepared, I reckon God the guide of the paradox, and we will ask him for the completion of what was begun through him. May he grant us to pursue philosophy together; if not that, at any rate to pursue philosophy. For my part, I am in labour to pour into this letter some thoughts in my soul about the subject we were treating; but I will not do it. For to you … may it be granted, God willing, to meet and talk with us about these things, and with many who know better. It is not right for me to trust such things to writing; for a letter is not discreet, but by nature talks to whoever comes upon it. Farewell; pursue philosophy, and keep digging up the eye that is buried in us. For living rightly, being, I think, the prelude to wisdom, was shown to be pursued earnestly by the ancient and wise men … as the divine voice says. But the many hold living rightly to be desirable not for the sake of wisdom but in itself, and the perfection of man; they think the road is not a road but the goal one must reach by it, and they think wrongly. For irrational self-control and much abstinence from meats have been given by nature to many irrational kinds. But we do not praise the crow, or any other creature that has found a natural virtue, because they are void of wisdom. The life according to mind is the end of man. Let us pursue this, asking from God to think divine things, and ourselves gathering wisdom from every side as far as we can …

To the same. I heard one of the clever speakers praising the use of letters; a sophist had made this the subject of many admirable speeches. Its praise was supplied from many sources, but above all from this, that a letter can be the consolation of loves that are not fortunate, giving, in the absence of bodies, an image of presence, and, by seeming to converse, satisfying the longing of the soul. So he sang the praises of the inventor of letters, and judged the gift worthy not of any man but of God to men. I enjoy this sacred grace of God, and with the one I ought to talk with, if I cannot talk, since I can write, I do this often; and so I am with him as far as possible and enjoy my beloved. But you yourself, if it is not petty to say so, have separated your mind along with the place. And if you do not stop withdrawing yourself from those who have loved you most guilelessly and honourably, you will have imitated the swallows, which settle into men's friendships, as it were, with singing, but leave them in silence. This is still said as to a man, and the complaints are human ones. But if through philosophy you have united what here below stands apart, and have heard the mind say that the friend is the beautiful, and the beautiful the same, and this is one, then we no longer judge your silence toward us to be contempt, but rejoice with you as one who pursues philosophy, refusing pettiness, and keeping company, with what is better in you, with what is better in us. May you be such, best of men, and truly my thrice-longed-for brother.

If there is such a goad of persuasion even in letters, if images of character have such power over readers, surely it would be an irresistible thing to touch them in person. Me, at any rate, you won over even when present by the sweet Siren of your words. Yet I would not be ashamed to say truly that a second experience would be sweeter to me. For one who has experienced a good does not perceive it when it is present as he does when it is absent. In the one case the continuity of enjoyment steals away the perception of the delight; but he who is separated a little from what is sweet at once has memory alongside, goading him, of what he truly had. Come, then, dearest head, and let us meet each other in philosophy, building what befits what has been begun, so that a beauty perfect from perfect parts may appear, and not a mutilated one. But if, as it is right to pray against, we should miss each other, it is clear that the harm is mine. For you, while things go well there, have companions both better and like yourself. My fatherland, because it is my fatherland, is precious to me; but toward philosophy it is, I do not know how, hardened. So it is not without fear that I remain without help, with no one to sing with me like a lark. And even if we grant that there are some …, against what other kindling, after your sacred soul, could I strike myself, to bring forth the shining offspring of the mind? Who is so able vigorously to call forth a hidden spark that loves to escape notice, by every device, and to kindle it and show a bright fire? May God, then, be present to us both, absent and together; and when God is present, every impossibility becomes possible. Farewell; pursue philosophy, and lead the divine in you up to the first-born divine. It is good, in every letter of mine, to say this from me to your honoured disposition, the words they say Plotinus spoke to those present as he was releasing his soul from the body …

Of loves, those which have their beginnings on the ground and are human are hateful and fleeting, measured only by presence, and that barely. But those which the presiding God arbitrates, in the divine words of Plato, fusing them by his art and making the two lovers one, refute the nature of time and place. For nothing prevents souls longing for each other from coming together in ineffable meetings and being entwined. It is from there that our love must hang, unless we are to shame the nurture of philosophy by loving sense perception, and … knocked at the door by bodies, not admitting the presence of soul. Why, then, do you lament, and pour tears into your letters? If it is out of pity for us, because we do not yet pursue philosophy, though we seem to and say we do, I recognize the truth of the lament. But if it is because senseless fortune has wronged our companionship (for this is the drift of your letters), it is womanish and childish to love things in which a spirit can harm the ends of our choices. But I asked that sacred head, Herculian, to look upward and be wholly a beholder of the things that are, having passed beyond the virtues of the starting-point of mortals, those turned long ago toward adorning things here below. And so to such a man the address of my letter is 'think much': not 'rejoice', nor 'fare well', which is more modest. For a lesser mind presides over actions, not the one I wished to dig up in you; about which I discussed a great deal with you in the first two letters, neither of which those who received them delivered. Indeed this is the fifth letter I am sending. May it not be in vain too; and it would not be in vain if first it were delivered, and then, more august than this, if you transferred the strength of the body to the courage of the soul: not to that of the first and earthly tetrad of the virtues, but to its analogue in the mind, when you admire nothing human. And even if the distinction in what has been said is not yet clear to you, which virtues are more primal and which are the lowest, let this be your rule and test of having attained the first: not to weep over anything, but justly to despise all things here, when that comes to you; so that 'think much' may return to you in our letters. May you live in health, with philosophy presiding over a waveless cheerfulness … apathy itself, while the middle states stop at moderation of the passions; where shall we place inexperience of passion and readiness to be humbled? Is it not far from philosophy, into whose mysteries we prayed you would be initiated? Not so, dearest of all to me; show your friend to be more manly. All my household has begged me to greet you on its behalf. Be greeted, then, by all, each one all but pouring out his soul into the greeting. And greet the mounted archer for us, I beg you.

Do not be surprised if I use one bearer for two letters. First, feel that you are paying the penalty for an untimely complaint, and take your fill of our garrulity; then, I also want the second letter to meet another need of mine. I ask for that little composition in iambics, in which the writer converses with his soul. At the time I thought I could put it together again from memory; but now there is a danger that the substitute would be nothing compared with it. If I let myself write it, I shall be using judgment rather than memory, perhaps for the worse, perhaps for the better. But one ought not to give birth twice to the same offspring, when one can have the one already born. Send me, then, a copy of the quire, for the sake of the very soul which the book wishes to adorn; but as quickly and as safely as possible. That is, if you do it through people who will deliver it quickly and surely. For if you fail in either, you will not have done it at all: if you send it more slowly, it will arrive after I have come; and if you give it to someone who will not surely deliver it, …

Odysseus I recognized in your letter, for many things brought the hero back to memory; but Proteus I did not recognize. For you, being such a man … 'and it is not unfitting to touch the demigods'. I am not wise in anything else; but in keeping with the Delphic inscription, having come to know myself, I condemn the poverty of my nature and renounce any kinship with heroes, except that I prayed to imitate their discretion, which you too confounded for me, like Menelaus from Sparta. So you are in danger of belonging to a pair of heroes, not to Odysseus alone. So much for that. Since you complained of my unfitness for writing, you have no right to demand a multitude of letters that will only annoy you; so I have shortened this one, so that there may not be more toil for one who reads more. Farewell, and live cheerfully, using philosophy as your guide to the divine, admirable friend. Greet the admirable Count, to whom we did not allow ourselves to send greetings in person … For the saying from poetry holds that it is right for the younger to begin war and strife, but the elder friendliness. And yet …

You are not keeping our agreement, my friend, not to make public what deserves to be hidden. For I heard from some who came from you, who remembered certain expressions and asked us to uncover their meaning for them. But we, after our manner, neither claimed the writings before them nor said that we recognized them. You need no longer an admonition from us, dear head, for ours is too small to persuade you; but seek out the letter of Lysis the Pythagorean to Hipparchus, and if you find it anywhere, do me the favour of reading it often. Perhaps you would come to a strong repentance for that which, as Lysis says in his Doric way, 'began great contempt for divine things among men'. For I myself have associated with some, both long ago and recently, men who through rashly hearing … what they were, laymen; and, filled with conceit, they blunted divine doctrines by pretending to teach what they had never had the good fortune to learn. And indeed they attached to themselves admirers, three or four, no less vulgar in soul, some of them not even led through the preliminary studies. For conceit of wisdom is a terrible and deceptive thing: it rises up among those who know nothing, and dares everything without circumspection. For what could be bolder than ignorance … among drones, who neither understand words nor desire them; hating the tribe, I find no other cause of their rearing than that they were thought worthy of the first principle without guidance and before their time, perhaps by others like themselves, at very costly lectures. For this reason I am myself a more careful guardian of the mysteries of philosophy, and I urge you to be one too. That this befits Herculian, I know; but if you have genuinely come to philosophy herself, you must stand aloof from fellowship with those who turn away from her and make a bastard of her supreme majesty by their pretension. By God, the overseer of friendship, do not take this letter out to anyone. For if you do, the marks of their wickedness will grieve those who recognize in themselves or in their friends the tokens of what is said.

Phoebammon, who hands you this letter, is a good man and a friend, and he is being wronged. On every count, then, you ought to help him: for our sake, for his character, and for his circumstances. Let this be done; for he seems to have trusted greatly in our goodwill toward each other. Needing you, he took refuge with me, confident that through me he would obtain your help. And I promised him Herculian through Synesius, and victory over those who trouble him through Herculian, that sacred and honoured head. About the Count you wrote through Ursicinus (I mean the one who obtained command of the soldiers in my fatherland), and you asked for tokens from us, so that letters might be written by those of your friends who are able to do this, to him and to the ordinary governor. I welcomed your intention then, but declined the deed as superfluous, setting myself bare for philosophy. But now friends who are being wronged, private persons and soldiers, compel me to wish …

A servant of mine has run away: not one of my ancestral servants, nor of those otherwise brought up with me. For those, having shared a free upbringing and being treated, I might almost say, as equals, love me as a chosen ruler rather than fear me as a master by law. But Philoromus (that is the runaway's name), being a servant of my niece, the daughter of Amelius, becomes mine through her. Brought up careless and undisciplined, he could not bear a philosophic and Spartan supervision; and now, having found an Alexandrian master in place of me, he goes about Egypt with him. Harpocration is one of Herculian's guardsmen, holding the rank of assistant to the assistant. … Philoromus is with this man. I, for my part, would have said goodbye to him. For where is it reasonable that the worse should not need the better, and the better, who admit that they are better, should need the worse? But the wretch's mistress is not yet persuaded to be so much a philosopher as to despise those who do not cling to her, and she begged hard that men be sent to bring him back. Our tent-mate Aeithales undertook the service of his own accord, and I have sent him, trusting in God as guide and promising him human help from you. May the letter be delivered to you; what follows, since you have taken up the matter, will be the care of God, of yourself, and of Aeithales.

Wishing to make your sacred soul more manly by rebuking, in letters, the vehemence of your … toward …

I think you are faring well beyond what one could pray for, you who have left us men … rolling about in earthly cares, have set yourself above them, withdrawn while still here below, and taken hold of the blessed life; unless Ganus, being a friend, thinks that in telling and reporting your affairs to us he must lie a little; for goodwill is apt to steal the truth. This Ganus, then, ascribed to you the solitary life, and said that your pretext for coming into the city is books, and their meaning so far as it bears on theology; and he says you wear a grey cloak. Nothing would be lost if it were white; for what is pure among sensible things would rather be dedicated to the most luminous nature, and is more like light. But if you have also approved the dark one, since you did it in emulation of some who went before you, I approve everything that is done for the sake of the divine. For the purpose for which a thing is done grants success to the doer, and the choice carries the virtue. We, then, rejoice with you, who have reached at a stroke the goal at whose door we have long been knocking with toil and barely. Pray with us that we too may arrive one day, and find some gain from our labour in philosophy, so that we may not have worn away our life over books to no purpose. Live in health and happiness, admirable friend.

I have left the ranks of the tribute-payers. For what was I to do, when none of the Greeks who live in Libya is willing to send merchantmen to our sea? And I release you from the contribution too; for neither do the Syrians care to put in at the Cyrenaean coasts. And even if that did happen, I would not notice it. For I am no neighbour of the sea, nor do I often frequent harbours; I have moved away toward the south wind, the farthest of the Cyrenaeans; and our neighbours are such as Odysseus was seeking when he went about holding his oar, to appease the wrath of Poseidon as the oracle bade, men 'who do not know the sea, nor eat food mixed with salt'. But do not think it idle talk that people here do not use the sea even for salt; nor think that for this reason they eat their meat and cakes unsalted. By sacred Hestia, there are inland salts among us, lying farther to the south than the sea lies to the north. These we call the salts of Ammon. A crumbly rock both nourishes and hides them; when you remove what lies over it like a scab, it is very easy to plough the depth with hands and hoes. What is dug up … 'For no wave of the sea leaping up wakes them in the night', but the neighing of horses and the bleating of flocks; and when the first ray strikes, the humming of the bees, which yields to no music in the account of pleasure. Do I seem to you to be describing the estates of Anchemachus, living as we do in such a countryside, far from the city, from roads, from trade, and from varied manners? With us there is leisure to pursue philosophy, but no leisure to do evil. All gatherings are among companions, who use each other's help for farming, for flocks, for shepherds, for hunting the manifold creatures the earth bears. For it is not the custom with us, either for ourselves or for our horses, to take food without sweat. We breakfast … and the kykeon that Hecamede mixes for Nestor. After toil, the kykeon is a strong remedy in the summer season. We also have wheaten cakes, and fruits to nibble, some cultivated and some wild, all of the country, juices of the best soil; and honeycombs, and goats' milk, for we do not think it right to milk cows. Hunting with dogs and horses also makes no less abundance on our tables; I do not know how Homer did not call it 'glorious to men', nor say that men become distinguished in it, while he honoured the assembly with such praise, which provides shameless and utterly wicked little men, with nothing sound in them, abusive and skilled in stitching mischief. We laugh at them whenever they come to share our table; for they shudder at game meat roasted in the ovens. And why do I say game? They would taste poison sooner than taste these with us. They look for the thinnest wine and the thickest honey, the lightest oil and the heaviest wheat; and they sing the praises of the native lands of these, Cyprus and some Hymettus, and Phoenicia, and the barbarian country. But our land, even if in each single thing it is beaten by the land that bears the top prize for it, beats each of them in all the rest. And this is the first prize won from second places, by which Peleus and Themistocles too were proclaimed the best of all among the Greeks. Even if we grant that the honey here is inferior to that of Hymettus, still it is such that, when it is at hand, there is no need of the foreign juice. Our oil, however, is plainly the best, unless those with corrupted diets are the judges. For they weigh it, testing its quality by weight, and count lightness as an advantage. We forge no scales for oil; but we say that, if it must be done, it is the nature that draws more down that should be honoured. Certainly their admired and purchased oil, in the wicks, feeds a weak flame through its nothingness; but ours, through its nobility, raises up a whole bonfire, and when a lamp is needed, makes a hand-made day. It is good for enriching barley-cake, good for nourishing the sinews of those who train their bodies. Music too is native to us as nothing else is, a shepherd's music, simple and home-made, auspicious and fittingly manly, not unworthy to bring up the children in Plato's city. For it is not reckoned by intricacy, nor does its excellence lie in being elaborately tuned; with the simple instrument of strings the singers keep time. For they do not set themselves to luxurious themes; we have a fine thing in song: the praise of the ram with all his parts, and the dock-tailed dog receives an encomium, because, I think, he is just, not fearing hyenas and throttling wolves. And the huntsman not least becomes the subject of song …

You are always present among us in memory, even when absent. For even if we wished it very much, we could not forget your sweetest soul and most guileless character, brother admirable in all things. Nothing could be holier to us than the memory of you, except to embrace your venerable head again; which may God grant some day, and may we see you, and hear the sweetest echo of your words. You pleased us also with what you sent; for we received everything. But you grieved us more by making us reckon what a friend we, though alive, are deprived of while he lives. May the moment of meeting come at last, and may I obtain this from God.

I think that your Heraclea too has not failed to hear of Alexander, who practised philosophy among us, a man who travelled everywhere with glory. 'Deaf is the man who does not lend his voice to Heracles.' His son, my cousin, will hand you this letter; he has plainly stepped into his father's place, not by his dress but by his mind. He is being sent on behalf of his fatherland itself. He needed, of course, God and Heracles; but also Iolaus, as ally and helper. God he will win for himself in the way that is possible, and incline to himself by virtue of life and piety of mind; your friendship, in place of Iolaus's, we woo for him through this letter. You will be to him all that you are to us. And if you make use of the young man's friendship, you will certainly say that I am no poor praiser.

Will you remain a philosopher for me? Will the soul, the divine seed, remain? I fear the time that has passed since birth. I fear still more the dealings of the market-place, and being rolled about among frequent fortunes and affairs, lest they defile the most holy temple, your sacred mind, which I, with few others, consider a most worthy receptacle of God. And I know … having once made a prayer to work at philosophy together with you. But since love of your fatherland proved stronger, I prayed that wherever on earth you might be, you would cultivate philosophy as far as you could. Therefore I greet that dear head, and very often greet that dear head, both in silence and in speech, both in writing and without writing.

Imagine me embracing Pylaemenes: the very soul with the very soul. I am at a loss for words in which to pour out all that my mind wishes; or rather, I cannot even find out what this feeling of my soul toward you is. But there was a man skilled in the things of love, Plato son of Ariston, of Athens, resourceful in finding and ready in expressing the nature of a lover and what he wishes to happen to him with regard to his beloved; and he has found it and said it on my behalf too. He would wish, he says, to be fused and grown together by the art of Hephaestus, and to become one from two.

Once a year letters come to us from you, as if the seasons brought this too. To me, perhaps, this fruit is sweeter than what the circling months and the farmers bring forth. But you would not act fairly in depriving us of the joy they give. Change your mind, then, and this year at least make for us …

This year I have produced two books: one moved by God, the other by the abuse of men. For some of those in white cloaks and some of those in dark ones said that I transgress against philosophy because I care for beauty and rhythm in diction and think it right to say something about Homer and about the figures used in oratory; as though the philosopher ought to be a hater of letters and busy himself only with divine matters. They themselves, of course, have become beholders of the intelligible; but it is not lawful for me, because I allot some leisure from life to purifying my tongue and making my mind more pleasant. What led them to condemn me as fit only for play was that my 'Hunting' pieces, having somehow slipped out of the house, were eagerly studied by some young men who care for Greek style and grace; and certain carefully made pieces of poetry, showing something of the ancient hand, as we say of statues. But of those critics, some, with ignorance leading their boldness, are the readiest of all to talk about God; whenever you meet them, you will at once hear something about inconclusive syllogisms; and they pour out their words on those who do not need them, for their own advantage, I think. For it is from these that the public teachers in the cities come, which is the same to them as the horn of Amalthea, and they think they must use it. You recognize, I think, this facile tribe, which brings a noble subject into disrepute. These men think I should become their disciple, and say they will make me within a short time most daring in speaking about God, able to harangue day and night on end. Others, better educated, are far more wretched sophists than these; they would like to win fame in the same things, but they are fortunate in not being able even to do that. And you know some who stripped for the contest in counting-houses, or were persuaded by some single misfortune to take up philosophy in the midday of life, on the sole qualification of swearing off the gods and swearing by them in the Platonic manner; a shadow would be quicker than they to utter anything needful. Yet the pretension is formidable. Their eyebrow, oh, how high it is raised! and the hand props up the chin. And in other respects they put on a more solemn face than the statues of Xenocrates. They even think fit to lay down for us the law that is most profitable to themselves: that no one who knows anything good should make it plain; for they consider it a refutation of themselves if anyone who seems to be a philosopher should know how to speak. For they would escape notice under their pretension and seem to be full of wisdom within. Both these kinds have slandered me as having spent my zeal on worthless things: the one because I do not talk the same nonsense as they; the other because I do not keep my mouth shut and put 'the ox on my tongue'. For these reasons the treatise was composed, and it meets the one with speech and the other with silence. It is put forward as against these very ones, the voiceless and envious (with how seemly a form, you may imagine); but it has found a way to drag the others along with them. It aims to be no less a display of learning than an encomium (for I have not abjured the charges); and so that they may be annoyed still more, I have been lavish in it too. Going on to examine the choices of life, it praises philosophy as the most philosophic of choices; what kind of philosophy one should think it to be, ask the book. At the end it also defends the chests, which also have some reason for hiding uncorrected books; for not even from such things have the Telchines held off. If each part stands in its proper order, and all is in season, and the starting-points of what is treated in each place are just; and if it is divided into several heads, like that divine writing, the Phaedrus, which Plato produced on all the forms of the beautiful together, yet contrived so that all converge on the one subject; and if anywhere a proof has crept in under a relaxed narrative, and, as in such writings, a demonstration has come forth from the proof; and if what arose for another purpose also serves: these would be gifts of art and of nature. But whoever is not untrained in detecting a divine face hidden under a meaner form (as the craftsmen at Athens used to do, wrapping Aphrodite and the Graces and such divine beauties in statues of Silenuses and Satyrs), him the writing will not escape: under the pretence of digression it escapes others, being scattered through the discourse seemingly at random and naïvely. For of the chills caused by the moon, only the sick feel the epilepsy; and only those receive the illuminations of the intuitions of the mind whose healthy intellectual eye God kindles with a kindred light, which is the cause to minds of their understanding and to intelligibles of their being understood; just as the light here joins sight to colour, and if you take it away, though both are present, the power directed to it is inactive. On all these matters we shall await your judgment. And if you vote that it should be put before orators and philosophers alike, … it will be of profit, in any case, unless it is struck out by you, who are able to judge. But if it does not seem to you worthy of the ears of the Greeks, and you, with Aristotle, place truth before a friend, a thick and deep darkness will cover it, and it will pass unspoken among men. So much on this. The other book God both commanded and approved, and it has been dedicated as a thank-offering to the imaginative nature. In it the whole imaginal soul is examined, and certain other doctrines are put forward which have not yet been treated by the Greeks in philosophy. And why should one lengthen the account of it? It was completed entirely in one night, or rather in the remnant of a night, which also brought the vision that it should be written. There are places in the discourse, twice or three times, where I became, as though I were someone else, a hearer of myself together with those present; and now, as often as I go over the treatise, a wonderful disposition comes upon me, and a divine voice pours round me, as the poets say. Whether this is my experience alone, or whether it might happen to another as well, you will tell me; for you will be the first of the Greeks after me to read it. These, of the works not yet published, I have sent you. And so that the number may be perfect, I have added the speech on the gift, made long ago at the time of the embassy, to a man holding power beside the emperor; and the Pentapolis profited somewhat from both the speech and the gift.

Having learned very clearly from your deeds themselves that your admirable head rejoices in kindness and is willing to stretch out a hand to those in need, I appeal to you for this very thing, thinking I am urging horses onto the plain, as the saying goes. And you must show your kindness now more than before, dear head, inasmuch as the person who is to be benefited is now more pitiable. For she is a woman, and a woman who has suffered widowhood, and then, with an orphaned child, has suffered what she has suffered. Who it is that has wronged her, and in what, and how, she herself will tell your nobility. See to it, then, admirable friend, that you defend the woman, both because it is right, and because it befits you, and for my sake. For I too shall share in what is done for her, since she is my kinswoman, and was brought up modestly among us by a decent mother.

Just causes need allies, and those who help them would be happy, defending what is right … and by skill. My part is to do good to all whom I can. You yourself provide the occasions.

A letter of Synesius to one of his companions who asked from afar for a bishopric, after the restoration of the bishops. Your most wise letter, very harmonious, very short, yet very clear, which your admirable mind brought forth, did us the greatest good when it arrived, and pleased us doubly: because it came from the best and most praiseworthy of friends, and because it was crafted with abundant grace. Yet it also stirred me to something greater and bolder, for which, perhaps, unless longing had come in (being apt to join things far apart and often to reconcile things contrary to each other), I would have to ask pardon along with those who are rightly indignant; it will need little to set us on our feet. 'Toward what?' you may say. Toward giving in return, as you see, our tongue to such a man, initiated in the Muses as I know not who else (on seeing whom Demosthenes would have said with us that an image of Hermes, god of eloquence, had come among men): our tongue, which long ago did not share in the better even with the tip of a finger, and now has become altogether rustic, and scarcely knows how to call a spade a spade. For I share with you a feeling kept secret, peculiar to me, which is now more likely to become decisive, as it was fated. This persuades you to pity us rather than call us happy, since it has not befallen us to mingle with anyone of the best lot, such as you (so that something of our barbarous part might be chiselled away from us, and thus our affairs might be rid, little by little, of their long grime); and now, since what you sought has not appeared in season, it gives more reason for pity than before. For the olive which you think fit, and I wish, or rather had in prayer, to pass over to such a man, having stayed where it was, as the nature of things allowed, has been put to its uses. So there is no olive now lacking grafts (bear with me if I indulge the common tongue a little) onto which my sweet friend might be grafted; for each is filled, and is already beginning to bear fruit as best it can. So much for that; the rest the present time will make plain, and perhaps it will show you clearly how what you asked had no season. Farewell, and be of good cheer, laying claim to all philosophy.

[Homily 1] I will not leave the festival without a voice, nor yet with many words: by my voice honouring God, by stopping quickly gratifying the festival. But so that you may be a festival-keeper worthy of God, do not long for a drunken table after the fast. Crown for God a bowl of a sober mixture. Our God is Wisdom and Word. A bowl that unsettles thought and troubles reason has nothing to do with the Word. There is a relaxation fitting to God, and there is a relaxation fitting to demons. 'Rejoice in the Lord with fear.' Whenever you feast, it says, remember God; for that is when the great slide into sin happens. When the body is well fed as to flesh, it turns the soul away from understanding. 'A cup in the hand of the Lord, of unmixed wine, full of mixture; and he poured from this into that; but its dregs were not emptied.' Drink of that cup, and you have become worthy of the Bridegroom's banquet. That cup is the maker of the best; it is full of wine which, even when remembered, calls us to rouse ourselves to understanding. The saying is clear in itself, but it needs much understanding. 'A cup of unmixed wine, full of mixture; and he poured from this into that.' If unmixed, how full of mixture? And if it is one, how did he pour from this into that? What is said seems altogether absurd, but not when it is understood. God cares nothing for the diction of the inspired; the divine Spirit disregards the pettiness of writers. Would you see the harmony within the discord? Of what cup, then, does it speak? Of the Word which we have from God, offered to men from God, in the Old Testament and the New. For with this drink the soul is watered. Since each is Word, each is unmixed; yet it is mixed, being twofold. For what is composed of both is one: the perfection of knowledge. The Old held the promise; the New brought forth the one sent; and 'he poured from this into that' hints at the succession of teachers, of the law of Moses and of the Lord's law; and the cup is one. For one Spirit breathed into prophet and apostle. And, like good painters, he first sketched in outline, and then finished in detail the members of knowledge. 'But its dregs were not …' …

[Homily 2] Holy night, bringing to the newly initiated a light such as no sun has ever shone by day; for it is not even holy to compare the Creator with the fairest thing on earth. But that light which enlightens souls, and which enlightened the visible sun, is not a created thing either. By the confession of the present blessedness … If you so remain, you will keep the present blessedness, more enviable, for the present, if not for life. Now each of you goes about the city as an angel. Now consider that it is said of you, 'being on earth, and having your citizenship in heaven'. Fear to fall from your dignity; defilement after cleansing is hard to wash out …

[A further piece, heading lost] The people of Leontopolis have resolved on something gentler than their own nature: leaving off from each other, they have indicted their neighbours for illegality. For until yesterday and the day before, brothers against brothers, son against father, and father against his family called in the executioner. Perhaps not even what is now attempted means that they are giving up their ancestral mutual slaughter; but privately each goes after his own, and in common the city goes after its unfortunate neighbours. For they cannot bear it unless the character of the city is accusatory even in public, and it enters into the place of a sycophant. But for us, as regards doing no wrong, the very charges make it clear … We learned to farm, not to plead lawsuits. Why, then, when the proper boundaries have long since been shown to them, do they think fit to overstep them, and come against us who are scorched above them, who are thirstier and wronged by our position, and always sell off our surplus? Since this year no money came in to them, they think fit that our misfortunes should provide it. This is what their recent indictments aim at, and their decrees have no other object. They admit a second thing as well, which is worth being said by us first and alone, as it shows their most unjust undertaking. For long ago they laid a foundation for their sycophancy, on behalf of license to use waters that did not belong to them, to the venerable …