Letter 592: This man Firmus is a concern to my mother, and a concern to me on her account.

LibaniusKlematios|c. 370 AD|Libanius|AI-assisted
property economics

To Clematius (357)

This Firmus here is an object of concern to my mother, and he is a concern to me as well on account of my mother. And he might reasonably be a concern to you too, for the sake of us both.

Firmus is of good birth and poor, having come to poverty through the troubles in Palestine. Yet, bearing his poverty and not coveting money, he desires that you should know this much: that he is a concern to us.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.

Latin / Greek Original

Κληματίῳ. (357)

Φίρμου τουτουὶ μέλει μὲν τῇ μητρί μου, μέλει δὲ καἰ
ἐμοὶ διὰ τὴν μητέρα. καὶ σοὶ δ’ ἂν εἰκότως ἀμφοῖν εἵνεκα
μέλοι.

ἔστι δὲ ὁ Φίρμος εὐγενής τε καὶ πένης ὑπὸ τῶν ἐν
Παλαιστίνῃ κακῶν εἰς πενίαν ἐλθών. φέρων δὲ τὴν πενίαν
καὶ χρημάτων οὐκ ἐπιθυμῶν ἐπιθυμεῖ γνῶναί σε τοῦθ’, ὅτι
ἡμῖν αὐτοῦ μέλει.

Revision history

  1. 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import

    Initial corpus import from modern libanius retranslated v1.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek/blob/master/volume_xml/libanius_10.xml

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