Letter 1016: A grateful, self-deprecating response to praise that makes Libanius young again.

You seem to me to confirm completely Isocrates' saying about the nature of rhetoric: that words can raise up small things and bring down great ones. In your case the first has already been done, and what you have achieved shows that you want the second to be true as well. I congratulate you on your strength, though while reading your letter I blushed deeply: I looked for the qualities you praised in me and could not find them. It seemed to me that, because you love me so much, you had neglected the truth. I wondered what you would be like composing a formal encomium of the best man, when even in a letter you show yourself like this, bringing Aeson back to his prime, giving him a second youth, and with it the hair Homer gives and you pass on to me. There is something affectionate, too, in this gift of years as if they were money, and in those who, by the same act, make my life longer and their own shorter. First among them was noble Aburgius, pouring out a great and beautiful stream. May the Muses preserve him for the young men who long for rhetoric, and may they bring him to my gray hair doing what he does now. He makes statues, ornaments to the Greek race. The foremost of them is this Maxentius, who received much from you, a little from the second man, and then much again from you. I hear that among you the best things and the dinners are of this kind; the man who taught us both had been your guest himself. You urge my weakness to produce speeches by saying what you say about them. I do not urge your vigor, because it is already urged on by itself. I think that even when you have passed the same stretch of time I have, you will not need anyone to stir you, since you do for yourself what you now do for me.