Letter 5027: You do well to console my leisure with your steady stream of letters.

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusUnknown|c. 379 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|AI-assisted
friendshipgrief deathillnessproperty economics

You do, as is fitting, what you do in consoling my leisure with a steady stream of your writings. Indeed, you infer from your own affection that the gift which proceeds from your most holy and brilliant lips is delightful to me. I therefore return the exchange more as a testimony of gratitude than as matching the service by which I acknowledge myself bound. But by this very fact I judge myself the more worthy of more frequent conversation, in that I render you this palm as though conquered by the interest accruing on your letters.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

Facis, ut decet, quod otium meum scriptorum assiduitate solaris. siquidem ex tno
amore coniectas, iucundum mihi esse munus, quod ex tuo sanctissimo ac luculento ore
profieiscitur. refero igitur vicem magis ad testimonium gratiae quam ad aequiparan-
dum officium, quo me agnosco devinctum. sed hoc ipso arbitror digniorem me esse i»
conloquio crebriore, quod hanc palmam tibi reddo quasi victus fenore litterarum.

XXXXVI (XXXXim) a. 393.

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

Related Letters