Letter 2: (Written about the same time, in reply to another letter now lost.) I do not like being joked about Tiberina and its mud and its winters, O my friend, who are so free from mud, and who walk on tiptoe, and trample on the plains. You who have wings and are borne aloft, and fly like the arrows of Abaris, in order that, Cappadocian though you are, y...
Gregory to Basil.
You make fun of me about Tiberina and its mud and its winters -- you, my friend, who are so far above the mud yourself, walking on tiptoe and trampling the plains beneath you! You who have wings and soar aloft, flying like the arrows of Abaris, all so that -- Cappadocian though you are -- you may escape from Cappadocia. Have we done you some injury? While you are pale and breathless and measuring the sun, we are sleek and well-fed and not lacking for room. And yet that is your situation: you live in luxury and wealth, and you go to market. I cannot approve of this. So either stop mocking us for our mud -- since you did not build your city, and we did not create our winter -- or for our mud we will match you with your petty merchants and all the other nuisances that infest cities.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
(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.
Since you do take my jokes kindly, I send you the rest. My prelude is from Homer. Come now and change your theme, And sing of the inner adornment.
(The division of the civil Province of Cappadocia into two Provinces in the year 372 was followed by ecclesiastical troubles. Anthimus, the Bishop of Tyana, the civil metropolis of the new division of Cappadocia Secunda, maintained that the Ecclesiastical divisions must necessarily follow the civil, and by consequence claimed for himself that th...
The proverb says You are not proclaiming war, and, let me add, out of the comedy, O messenger of golden words. Come then; prove this in act, and hasten to me. You will come as friend to friend.
You yourself will judge whether I have added anything in the way of learning to the young men whom you have sent. I hope that this addition, however little it be, will get the credit of being great, for the sake of your friendship towards me. But inasmuch as you give less praise to learning than to temperance and to a refusal to abandon our soul...