Letter 1022: People who lack confidence in themselves seek letters of recommendation from me.
Those who are abandoned by their own self-confidence receive my letters to serve as a recommendation. In the present case it is otherwise. For I have given a letter to my brother Potitus on this condition, that he should commend it himself. For he is in no way different from what I am, being among the foremost of your friends. When he has put you in possession of his presence, I fear that my excuse may not be one deserving of pardon. But if your readiness to be appeased has been rightly known to me by experience, I think it will turn out that you will not assail me, who have stayed behind, by comparison with the other who is coming, but will rather receive him on behalf of us both. Farewell.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Qui sua fiducia deseruntur, epistulas meas in usum commendationis accipiunt. id
nunc aliter est. nam fratri meo Potito hac condicione litteras dedi, ut eas ipse com-
mendet. est enim nihilo secus, atque ego sum, de summatibus amicorum tuorum. qui 15
ubi te conpotem fecerit praesentiae suae, vereor ne excusatio mea ignoscenda non sit.
sed si mihi placabilitas tua experiundo probe cognita est, futurum reor, non ut me,
qui resedi, conlatione venientis alterius incessas, sed ut illum magis pro utroque sus-
cipias. vale.
XX (KY) a. 378. 20
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern symmachus retranslated v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/qaureliisymmach00seecgoog
Related Letters
Your daughter's birthday was approaching, and the gifts you'd sent arrived at just the right moment.
I interrupt your busy schedule with my steady stream of letters — partly because I enjoy this kind of exchange...
I'm doing exhausting work: I keep writing to someone who keeps not answering.
If you have a taste for natural history — the kind Pliny labored over — here are some volumes I happened to have on...
...long days on the road, rough lodgings, the creeping cold, the shrinking daylight, and all the other hazards of...