Letter 5023: I can hardly bear the departure of friends, but when they head off to be in your company, I feel as though they were...
I am accustomed to bearing the departure of friends with impatience, but those who, having left the city, hasten toward your presence, I believe will come to me. What of the fact that, setting affection aside, I envy those who are to be with you? For they alone will reap the blessings of your presence, the enjoyment of which ought to be shared with me. Yet however that condition stands, I have sent off our brothers Celsus and Nicianus, men of approved worth, not unwillingly, confident that, through their report, something of your conversations and doings will make its way back to us. That you restore them in good time to the city and to their studies, this in turn I request of you. For if I were to dissemble with you about this petition, I would seem to have allotted their journey not to your reverence, but to have rendered it as a service to my own fastidiousness. [The remainder of the source field is an editorial critical apparatus recording manuscript variant readings, not part of the letter text.]
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Inpatienter amicorum soleo perferre discessum, sed eos, qui ad praesentiam tuam
relicta urbe contendunt, ad me credo venturos. quid quod sequestrata adfectione in-
video tecum futuris? soli enim bona praesentiae tuae capient, quomm communis mihi 25
fructus esse deberet. wtut est tamen ista condicio, fratres nostros Celsum atque Nicia-
num probabiles viros non invitus emisi, certus aliquid ad nos ex fabulis atque actibus
tuis eorum relatione redituram. qnos ut mature urbi studiisque restituas, vicissim de
te postulo. nam fsi te ab ac petitione dissimulem, videor eomm peregrinationem non
tuae detulisse reverentiae, sed meo praestitisse fastidio. ao
1 q. auf. symmacbi. u/ oxplic. iiii. ad efesti//// incip eiusdem ad neot///// P, symmaohus ad neothe-
rium F, om. V 3 om. VF 4 reditum P 1 m. /nim P 5 nancta P 7 deplo>
matis P 1 m. VF 8 magna P 1 m. 9 meos F meum] meus VF in gaudio F do-
lore P 1 m. 10 tantumj tamen V
lem VAf, nam nisi te hac petitionc destimulem ego
xxxxi (XXX vmi).
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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