Letter 1241: You seemed to have a good pretext for your last offence to forgive yourself as avenging your brother.

You seemed to have a good pretext for your last offence to forgive yourself as avenging your brother. But for your current offence, you have nothing of the sort to cover yourself, and you have even lost the benefit of the first forgiveness. Because if you were avenging earlier the wrongs done to your brother, how does it happen that you aren’t ashamed to do wrong today to him whose defence you claim to undertake, and to torment him by every means? This last offence is enough evidence to show that you deliberately commited the first one as well, because he who would not rescue a brother, how could he have rescued a foreigner?

You seemed to have a good pretext for your last offence to forgive yourself as avenging your brother. But for your current offence, you have nothing of the sort to cover yourself, and you have even lost the benefit of the first forgiveness. Because if you were avenging earlier the wrongs done to your brother, how does it happen that you aren't ashamed to do wrong today to him whose defence you claim to undertake, and to torment him by every means? This last offence is enough evidence to show that you deliberately committed the first one as well, because he who would not rescue a brother, how could he have rescued a foreigner?