To Datianus, senior official. (355)
Perhaps you will be willing to help me even in the present crisis, keeping faith with me to the end and with all your previous acts of kindness. But if I must suffer even this misfortune -- that your mind has changed -- I will never cast your earlier help from my memory. Those past kindnesses I will attribute to your nature; any change I will blame on an unkind fate.
But I beg you, by the labors you have endured on behalf of the Greeks and your friends: suppose I were in good health and choosing to flee that city because I consider this one better -- and let "better" here mean better for the company of students.
Then put it to the emperor -- and you have the influence, earned through long loyalty and wise counsel: "O Emperor, that man you are ordering to go to Thrace -- he will be like a farmer at sea, living perpetually on a ship."
"For just as the farmer cannot plow the ocean, so this man cannot sow his teaching among young men when the citizens have turned to other pursuits, and foreigners suspect the place and consider it a school of luxury."
"But Syria has been a workshop of the Muses for a long time, producing..."
Perhaps you will be willing to help me even in the present crisis, keeping faith with me to the end and with all your previous acts of kindness. But if I must suffer even this misfortune -- that your mind has changed -- I will never cast your earlier help from my memory. Those past kindnesses I will attribute to your nature; any change I will blame on an unkind fate.
But I beg you, by the labors you have endured on behalf of the Greeks and your friends: suppose I were in good health and choosing to flee that city because I consider this one better -- and let "better" here mean better for the company of students.
Then put it to the emperor -- and you have the influence, earned through long loyalty and wise counsel: "O Emperor, that man you are ordering to go to Thrace -- he will be like a farmer at sea, living perpetually on a ship."
"For just as the farmer cannot plow the ocean, so this man cannot sow his teaching among young men when the citizens have turned to other pursuits, and foreigners suspect the place and consider it a school of luxury."
"But Syria has been a workshop of the Muses for a long time, producing..."
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.