Letter 885
To Trajan.
One must not despise the faults that seem to be trivial, as though they were small; for that small sin is able to usher a person into great transgressions, and to do the very greatest harm. Guard yourself, therefore, against the slight passions of the soul, lest through the sins reckoned small you go down into the very pits of baseness.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Οὐ χρὴ τῶν δοκούντων εὐτελῶν εἶναι πταισμάτων
καταφρονεῖν, ὡς μικρῶν· τὸ γὰρ μικρὸν ἐκεῖνο
ἁμάρτημα εἰς μεγάλας παρανομίας δύναται εἰσ-
οδιάσαι τὸν ἄνθρωπον, καὶ καταβλάψαι τὰ μέγιστα.
Φυλάττου τοίνυν τὰ βραχέα τῆς ψυχῆς παθήματα,
ἵνα μὴ διὰ τῶν νομιζομένων μικρῶν ἁμαρτημάτων,
πρὸς αὐτὰ τῆς φαυλότητος κακελθεῖσῃ τὰ
βάραθρα.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern nilus ancyra workflow v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: project source import
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