Letter 354: Now I recognise men's description of me! Basil has praised me, and I am hailed victor over all! Now that I have received your vote, I am entitled to walk with the proud gait of a man who haughtily looks down on all the world.
Your praise has done it — now I truly believe what people say about me! With Basil's vote in my favor, I can walk around like I own the place.
I hear you've written a speech against drunkenness. I'd very much like to read it — not to try to be clever in response, but because once I've seen how you handle the subject, it will show me how to say what I mean.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
It is, I think, more needful for me to defend myself for not having begun to write to you long ago, than to offer any excuse for beginning now. I am that same man who always used to run up whenever you put in an appearance, and who listened with the greatest delight to the stream of your eloquence; rejoicing to hear you; with difficulty tearing ...
Oh, for the old days in which we were all in all to one another! Now we are sadly separated! You have one another, I have no one like you to replace you.
Every bishop is a thing out of which it is very hard to get anything. The further you have advanced beyond other people in learning, the more you make me afraid that you will refuse what I ask. I want some rafters.
(Perhaps about a.d. 357 or 358; in answer to a letter which is not now extant.) I have failed, I confess, to keep my promise. I had engaged even at Athens, at the time of our friendship and intimate connection there (for I can find no better word for it), to join you in a life of philosophy.
You have not yet ceased to be offended with me, and so I tremble as I write. If you have cared, why, my dear sir, do you not write? If you are still offended, a thing alien from any reasonable soul and from your own, why, while you are preaching to others, that they must not keep their anger till sundown, have you kept yours during many suns?