Already indeed I have given letters by my servants, whereby I might let you know how far your commendation has profited brother Imeterius with me. Yet, not doubting that at the beginning of his pontificate he will, as is fitting, attend to the offices of his elder brother, I have gladly added these also through him, in which I rejoice the more that the long-sought plunderer of my little work has come into my hands. And because I am reporting to you the little book itself, as far as he had indicated to me, I hope that, such as it is, that little work—neither published to no purpose nor by any means corrected—you may deign, if you condescend, to publish and to excuse before that sublime and most pious man, our brother Apollinaris.
To whom it would have been impious not to have first offered these things by the right of charity, were it not on the other hand absurd that I, to the son of lord Sidonius, amid the delights of his father's eloquence, should in my own times, when he must needs be nauseated, offer moreover a disdain born of presumption. Wherefore, the volume being more moderately pressed upon him through you—if the aforesaid brother should judge that it ought to be read even to infants—I can learn through whatsoever writings of his magnificence. But if, after the rivers of his father's fountains, as I rather think, he shall have cast away the poverty of a vein trickling with the thinnest dew, then without shame of mine and impiety of his, it will suffice me to have understood the censure of his reproof from this alone, if he keeps silence.