To Eudaemon. (357/358)
It is an old passion of mine to delight in Greek words and to consider that those who traffic in anything else are committing a crime against rhetoric. I used to be downcast, though, at having no one to share the hunt, no one ready to join me in tracking down these matters.
Someone even laughed at me once and said I was no more usefully occupied than those men comedy mocks for investigating the feet of a flea [a reference to Aristophanes' Clouds, where Socrates studies gnats]. So if something has escaped me, I am not surprised -- I simply could not cover everything alone.
But then you came to us from Egypt -- and many blessings on the man who imposed the necessity, who summoned you to a lawsuit but unwittingly gave the city the eloquence that was in you. It was then that I understood the proverb better than ever: "When two go together, they are much to one another" [Homer, Iliad 10.224].
Or perhaps not "to one another" but rather "you to me." For the asking was always mine, and the answering became yours. I think I may even have worn you out with the frequency of my questions -- some sent on slips of paper while you sat among your students, others put to you at home while you were often in the middle of dinner.
Most of it happened in a blizzard of inquiries whenever we ran into each other. For our conversations were not about income from one's profession, nor about food and what we had for dinner and what we would have next, nor about who was leaving office and who would succeed him. Such things, we felt, had nothing to do with the Muses.
No -- the moment I spotted you, I would drag you to the shop-screens and hold you there, practically nailing you in place, and plunge you into the testing of words. And you would sort the counterfeit from the genuine, defending words unjustly cast out and condemning ...
It is an old passion of mine to delight in Greek words and to consider that those who traffic in anything else are committing a crime against rhetoric. I used to be downcast, though, at having no one to share the hunt, no one ready to join me in tracking down these matters.
Someone even laughed at me once and said I was no more usefully occupied than those men comedy mocks for investigating the feet of a flea [a reference to Aristophanes' Clouds, where Socrates studies gnats]. So if something has escaped me, I am not surprised -- I simply could not cover everything alone.
But then you came to us from Egypt -- and many blessings on the man who imposed the necessity, who summoned you to a lawsuit but unwittingly gave the city the eloquence that was in you. It was then that I understood the proverb better than ever: "When two go together, they are much to one another" [Homer, Iliad 10.224].
Or perhaps not "to one another" but rather "you to me." For the asking was always mine, and the answering became yours. I think I may even have worn you out with the frequency of my questions -- some sent on slips of paper while you sat among your students, others put to you at home while you were often in the middle of dinner.
Most of it happened in a blizzard of inquiries whenever we ran into each other. For our conversations were not about income from one's profession, nor about food and what we had for dinner and what we would have next, nor about who was leaving office and who would succeed him. Such things, we felt, had nothing to do with the Muses.
No -- the moment I spotted you, I would drag you to the shop-screens and hold you there, practically nailing you in place, and plunge you into the testing of words. And you would sort the counterfeit from the genuine, defending words unjustly cast out and condemning ...
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.