Letter 1028: If you have a taste for natural history — the kind Pliny labored over — here are some volumes I happened to have on...

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusDecimus Magnus Ausonius|c. 379 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|From Rome|To Bordeaux|AI-assisted
education booksillness

If you have a love for the Natural History that Pliny composed, here for you are the volumes of it, of which I happened to have a copy on hand. In them, as I suppose, a copyist careless of accuracy will displease your abundant learning. But the negligence of correction shall do me no harm; for I preferred to win your approval by the speed of my own gift rather than by the scrutiny of another man's work. 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AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

Si te amor habet naturalis historiae, quam Plinins elaboravit, en tibi libellos,
quomm mihi praesentanea copia fuit. in quis, nt arbitror, opulentoe emditioni tnae
neglegens veritatis librarius displicebit. sed mihi frandi non erit emendationis incuria. 20
malni enim tibi probari mei muneris celeritate, quam alieni operis examine. vale.

XXV (XVnU) a. 379?

Revision history

  1. 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

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