Letter 2031: ...and you care for me, but I worry that you might take up some fight on my behalf while I'm away and draw hostility...

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusEmperor Theodosius I|c. 381 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|To Constantinople|AI-assisted
imperial politics

[...] and one who loves me, and I fear that you may take up some contest on behalf of an absent man's reputation and so divert certain hatreds against yourself. I ask, therefore, that you keep quiet. There will perhaps at some time be opportunity for me to assert the truth in the presence of the everlasting prince, our lord Theodosius, whose favor toward me has caused envy to contrive something against me in the meantime. I do not think that in good times this will be the condition of my case which it was under the tyrant, by whose letters, issued in response to Marcellinus's suggestion, you know that my men were fined. This I did not pass over in silence in my defense of the panegyric.

[Letter] 32a. 389?

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

et amantem mei, et vereor, ne snscipias nllnm pro absentis existimatione certamen i5
atque in te aliqua odia detorqneas. peto igitur, nt qniescas. erit fortasse copia mihi
adserendae qnandoqne apnd aetemnm principem dominum nostram Theodosinm veri-
tatis, cuius erga me favor fecit, ut aliqnid interim moliretur invidia. non pnto eam
causae meae bonis temporibns condicionem futuram, qnae sub tyranno fuit, cuius lit-
teris ad Marcellini suggestionem datis homines meos scis esse multatos. quod in 20
panegyrici defensione non tacui.

XXXn a. 389?

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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