Letter 657
To Sopater. (361 AD)
Who will win the crown at our festival — whether in wrestling, the pankration, or boxing — Zeus and Heracles know, along with whatever gods oversee those contests. But you, before any athlete has competed, have already defeated every festival-president the sun has ever seen — in excellence, in the number of competitors, and above all in the magnificence of your gifts, which you mingled with the banquets, compelled by no precedent and unlikely to find an imitator.
The expense is yours, but the glory it brings belongs to your whole family. When the recipients showed off their prizes and described them, I swelled with pride as if I myself had founded the Olympic Games.
Yet while I send others and urge them on, I sit here by necessity, suffering from my head. Still, I console myself for missing the spectacle through the wonder of those who were there.
And I contrived a way not to be entirely absent: I roused Olympius from deep grief and persuaded him to stop his mourning and join the festival. So now I consider myself seeing and hearing everything through his eyes and ears.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.