To Akakios. (357/58)
Your letter was sweeter than the storax you sent — and not only sweeter than that batch, but than the kind you say no longer reaches you from Isauria. As for your speech, I take pleasure in what you've already said, but you want me to hold back my complaints about what is still to come.
And yet, even if I say nothing, my heart is struck by the thought that there will be no help in what follows. I had been waiting for you, gaping toward the gates, asking Strategios, "When will he come?" and hearing "Any moment now." Then your letter arrived, and I had grief from every quarter: your wife's illness — a wife dear to you and the mother of Titianos — and the fact that you are weighed down by two burdens, her sickness and your beloved's absence from the contests.
I consoled myself with the thought that no one can be fortunate in everything, and I kept reciting to myself: "But not all things at once" [Homer, Iliad 4.320].
Strategios, meanwhile, was loudly denouncing Fortune, and being just as he always was — fearing the fear of the public speaker — he said everything imaginable about your absence.
As for me, I shall enter the hall trusting that Hermes will stand in for you. And for you, may you be freed from your present troubles and come to us, if that is better — or stay where you are, if that is better.
Your letter was sweeter than the storax you sent — and not only sweeter than that batch, but than the kind you say no longer reaches you from Isauria. As for your speech, I take pleasure in what you've already said, but you want me to hold back my complaints about what is still to come.
And yet, even if I say nothing, my heart is struck by the thought that there will be no help in what follows. I had been waiting for you, gaping toward the gates, asking Strategios, "When will he come?" and hearing "Any moment now." Then your letter arrived, and I had grief from every quarter: your wife's illness — a wife dear to you and the mother of Titianos — and the fact that you are weighed down by two burdens, her sickness and your beloved's absence from the contests.
I consoled myself with the thought that no one can be fortunate in everything, and I kept reciting to myself: "But not all things at once" [Homer, Iliad 4.320].
Strategios, meanwhile, was loudly denouncing Fortune, and being just as he always was — fearing the fear of the public speaker — he said everything imaginable about your absence.
As for me, I shall enter the hall trusting that Hermes will stand in for you. And for you, may you be freed from your present troubles and come to us, if that is better — or stay where you are, if that is better.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.