Letter 6064: Recommending leisure is easy enough -- but that kind of advice requires a man who's master of his own time.
It is a happy theme to urge a life of leisure; but this exhortation requires a mind that is its own master. As for us, neither does the faction of the envious permit us to stay settled, nor does the education of our young son permit a long sojourn abroad. And so, as best we can, now by departure and now by return, we vary the succession of our locations. Witness to this is the present letter, lately sent from a suburban estate, which another will follow from our property at Coranum, if nothing arranged disturbs it. It is your part to enhance, by frequent letters, the circumstances of such an absence of ours, to help it if it pleases you, to relieve it if it displeases you.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Felix materia est suadere otium; sed haec adhortatio animum sui iuris requirit.
nos neque residere patitur liventium factio nec filii iuvenis institutio longum peregri- 25
nari. quare ut possumus, modo abscessu modo reditu variamus locorum distinctionem.
testimonio est haec epistula suburbano agro fnuper emissa, quam de Corano nostro, si
nihil disposita turbaverit, alia consequetur. vestrum est huiusmodi absentiae nostrae
condicionem litteris frequentibus augere, si placet, iuvare, si displicet.
LXU (LXni) a. 398. 30
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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