To Anatolius. (356 AD)
In my other letters I praised everyone for their eagerness on my behalf. But as for you — that you rallied them too, enlisting the excellent Olympius — I was already convinced of this before anyone reported it, and indeed Antiochus has now confirmed it clearly.
You will not, however, share in my praise. For what you did to please yourself, no one else need thank you for. You are a Phoenician, dividing your time between there and here, pining when you don't see me and overjoyed when you do — you were simply arranging to be where you could see me often. Just as a man turning every stone in search of gold would not be praised for benefiting the gold — since his aim was to profit himself — so everything you engineered to keep me here was the work of a lover serving his own desires.
Now, I say all this in jest, so that you may shout and laugh as you always do. But know that my kidney disease has brought my body to such weakness that even if nothing had been accomplished on my behalf from that quarter, the affliction itself would certainly have settled the matter for me.
For a year and three months now this labyrinth of illness has held me, and I fear — I truly fear — that my eloquence will wither along with my body, and I shall appear to you diminished in both.
I would summon you here and reproach you for your absence, if I did not know that in Italy you are enjoying what cannot be found elsewhere: the incomparable Datianus, his voice, and his judgment — a man whose company cannot fail to sharpen one's mind, since even the memory of him makes us better and brings us to our senses.
In my other letters I praised everyone for their eagerness on my behalf. But as for you — that you rallied them too, enlisting the excellent Olympius — I was already convinced of this before anyone reported it, and indeed Antiochus has now confirmed it clearly.
You will not, however, share in my praise. For what you did to please yourself, no one else need thank you for. You are a Phoenician, dividing your time between there and here, pining when you don't see me and overjoyed when you do — you were simply arranging to be where you could see me often. Just as a man turning every stone in search of gold would not be praised for benefiting the gold — since his aim was to profit himself — so everything you engineered to keep me here was the work of a lover serving his own desires.
Now, I say all this in jest, so that you may shout and laugh as you always do. But know that my kidney disease has brought my body to such weakness that even if nothing had been accomplished on my behalf from that quarter, the affliction itself would certainly have settled the matter for me.
For a year and three months now this labyrinth of illness has held me, and I fear — I truly fear — that my eloquence will wither along with my body, and I shall appear to you diminished in both.
I would summon you here and reproach you for your absence, if I did not know that in Italy you are enjoying what cannot be found elsewhere: the incomparable Datianus, his voice, and his judgment — a man whose company cannot fail to sharpen one's mind, since even the memory of him makes us better and brings us to our senses.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.