To Bassus. (~358 AD)
While your son was here, I both loved him and helped him. Now that he is away, I still do one of the two — I have not stopped loving him. And it seems to me that you too, having found eloquence in him, are grateful to the one who gave it.
The proof: repayments come from you — great ones, for a free man. By "repayments" I mean your letters. You may add to these and give me a gift that costs you nothing yet means everything to me.
You know Cyrinus — a man whose eloquence would have seated him in a sophist's chair, but Fortune led him instead to governors' posts. I mean the man who served as assessor to Philippus, who tended Lycia, who saved Pamphylia, who governed Cyprus.
He has a son, Honoratus, whom you would not be wrong to call mine as well. This young man is enrolled in your corps [the bar] but now studies in ours [my school], and he will return to yours the better for his training here. He will come, I think, when he is sharpest at writing and accomplished at speaking. Let not his youth alarm his parents.
He is absent, then — not alone in this, but perhaps alone in having a noble reason for it. Respect that reason and honor him by granting him a place in the register of young men that will rank him above many. And from us in return: the only thing we possess — an acknowledgment of your favor in a long speech.
While your son was here, I both loved him and helped him. Now that he is away, I still do one of the two — I have not stopped loving him. And it seems to me that you too, having found eloquence in him, are grateful to the one who gave it.
The proof: repayments come from you — great ones, for a free man. By "repayments" I mean your letters. You may add to these and give me a gift that costs you nothing yet means everything to me.
You know Cyrinus — a man whose eloquence would have seated him in a sophist's chair, but Fortune led him instead to governors' posts. I mean the man who served as assessor to Philippus, who tended Lycia, who saved Pamphylia, who governed Cyprus.
He has a son, Honoratus, whom you would not be wrong to call mine as well. This young man is enrolled in your corps [the bar] but now studies in ours [my school], and he will return to yours the better for his training here. He will come, I think, when he is sharpest at writing and accomplished at speaking. Let not his youth alarm his parents.
He is absent, then — not alone in this, but perhaps alone in having a noble reason for it. Respect that reason and honor him by granting him a place in the register of young men that will rank him above many. And from us in return: the only thing we possess — an acknowledgment of your favor in a long speech.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.