Letter 5072: ...to bite back with retaliation, but I never repay a friend's negligence with equal contempt.
[...] to bite back in kind, but I never repay the negligence of friends with an equal measure of contempt. And would that the letter delivered to my son had contained nothing of the harshness arising from the obligation of a brotherly debt! Then I too should by no means seem to myself to have been passed over. As it is, two things have happened together: that the honor of the courtesy due to me was overlooked, and that the bitterness shared with my son struck me down. 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AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
talione mordere, sed amicorum neglegentiae numquam parem repono contemptura. at-
ditum V»
cum V* 13 frequentiae P, freqnentiae V sine V2
22 om. VF 25 uestris V^
que ntinam redditae filio meo litterae nihil ex conventione fraterni debiti asperitatis PV^-^F
habuissent! ego qaoqne mihi nequaquam viderer omissus. nunc duo pariter acciderunt,
ut me et honor officii praeteriret et participata cum filio amaritudo percelleret. vale.
LXXXXm (LXXXXI).
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
Related Letters
You ask — like a good citizen born for the common welfare — what reliable reports say about the current crisis.
This letter survives only in fragmentary form, with the manuscript text too damaged to reconstruct reliably.
Chrysostom does not summon Hesychius because of danger but asks for health letters.
Paulinus and Therasia, sinners, to their lord, kindred spirit, and venerable brother Augustine.
I am worried about two people: about you, that you may not commit an injustice; and about this man, that he may not...