Letter 343: IF these are the words of an untrained tongue, what would you be if you would polish them? On your lips live fountains of words better than the flowing of springs. I, on the contrary, if I am not daily watered, am silent.
If this is what an untrained tongue produces, what would you achieve if you actually worked at it? Your words flow like a natural spring — better than anything I could manage. I, on the other hand, dry up completely if I'm not fed new material every day.
Human translation - New Advent (NPNF / ANF series)
Latin / Greek Original
[Πρός: Λιβάνιος Βασιλείῳ]
Εἰ ταῦτα γλώττης ἀργοτέρας, τίς ἂν εἴης αὐτὴν ἀκονῶν; σοῦ μὲν γὰρ ἐν τῷ στόματι λόγων οἰκοῦσι πηγαί, κρείσσους ναμάτων ἐπιρροῆς· ἡμεῖς δὲ εἰ μὴ καθʼ ἡμέραν ἀρδοίμεθα, λείπεται τὸ σιγᾷν.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from New Advent / NPNF.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/blob/master/data/tlg2040/tlg004/tlg2040.tlg004.perseus-grc2.xml
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