Letter 1035: Your letter reached me at Capua and gave me pure delight.
The writings of your learning have granted me pure joy, which I received while stationed at Capua. For there was in them a charm steeped in Tullian honey [the eloquence of Cicero], and a praise of my own discourse that was not so much truthful as flattering. And so what I should rather admire, being uncertain of my judgment, I am in doubt: the ornaments of your speech or of your heart. For you so surpass others in eloquence that there is dread in writing back, and you so kindly approve our work that it is a pleasure not to keep silent. If I should proclaim more about you, I shall seem to be scratching in turn, and to be more an imitator of your address than an appraiser of it.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Merum mihi gaudium eruditionis tuae scripta tribuerunt, quae Capuae locatus
accepi. erat quippe in his oblita TuUiano melle festivitas et sermonis mei non tam
vera, quam blanda laudatio. quid igitur magis mirer, sententiae incertus addubito, 25
omamenta oris an pectoris tui. quippe ita facundia antistas oeteris, ut sit formido
rescribere, ita benigne nostra conprobas, ut libeat non tacere. si plura de te prae-
dicem, videbor mutuum scabere et magis imitator tui esse alloquii, quam probator.
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
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