It is long ago — if you either believe my word or feel worthily of our mutual affection — that, desiring to receive some letters of yours, I nonetheless wished the more to offer the office of my own duty, which in your person is owed by me first to affection, then to close bond, and lastly to dignity. We ought not always to commit things to be discharged to the occasions of travelers: for although the very opportunity of bearers ought, by its frequency, to be desirable to us, it is nonetheless necessary that that solicitude should excel which insinuates itself by its own appetite, without the intervention of another's need. Knowing myself bound to this homage, I long ago groaned in silence that the just repayment was cut off by the unjust barrier of an impeding obstacle.
For there had come — not only to our notice, but to our grief — the smoke of a fire prepared, which a stormy conspiracy, blowing with lying winds as though from spent ashes, had attempted in vain to stir up against your holy and simple innocence. On which account we feared to aggravate the burden of your anxiety by the vow of an offering, and to transmit an increase of grief in place of consolation. As we hung, then, under the cloud of this uncertainty, in confused expectation, God, when I did not expect it, offered me your letters — of your former serenity, of proven piety. There I recognized — at which I was sufficiently delighted — your hand; wherein, piously, a fatherly declamation; wherein, most of all, a hereditary benignity.
You wrote, then, Christ granting it, that now returned safely, all things are secure, and that around you the regard of the lord king Alaric remains unharmed and as of old. Although I would judge that, after any wavering whatsoever, the favor of such persons is not so given back without increase as it is not ended without danger. For they wish, as it were, to make satisfaction to an innocence that has been assailed, and then choose to have believed when they perceive: and thus our conscience suffices for them, if their own knowledge comes as witness. I, however, having received the announcement of your — nay, our — security, behold, I speak with God as witness, I burst into tears mingled with joy at the recollection of things past. For my mind, as your poet says (Aeneid II),
'there stole upon it the image of a dear parent' — as I turned it over in memory, right down to our persons, however unlike in profession, that a certain lot of common forebears is drawn on with an equality of labors, envy pursuing it. Yet that consolation which was theirs is available in God's name to us also: namely, that, assailed with every effort of rivals, with every tooth of a livid malice barking on all sides, as often as it seemed to be attacked, it was our household that lay under the accusation, not under the crime. For if you learned from your father Arcadius that a man serving the world is imperiled less amid arms than amid revilings, neither do I take little of example from my own Sidonius — whom I do not dare to call father — as to how much a cleric can endure.
Wherefore may the Divinity grant this: that, as it is nothing new for such things to be cast at us, so no novelty may make us deservedly accused. But let the discourse, briefly touched from the opportunity of bitterness, now desist from the theme of gladness; nay rather, let the ineptitude of idle boldness furnish something for you to laugh at. Some months ago I saw letters given to a certain common friend of your Magnificence, in which, after the customary salutation, declaiming in the closing part of the epistle, you wrote that the little books had pleased you which — amid occupations of writing serious and more necessary things — I nonetheless had, as it were, played with, in the manner of a poem, upon the deeds of spiritual history.
Here now that I say nothing falsely, nothing flatteringly, I call God to witness before your sincerity, that I was as much delighted by your judgment as if, having confessed my studied meditations to the ears of my father's house, I were bestowed under a censor by the weight of praise of whatever kind. For first I rejoiced that you laid open your sense to this one more freely than to another. Then, that I recognized you willed no less than believed some good to come from the endeavor of a brotherly work: certainly, if by the merits of the composition you do not find as much as you wished, I want you to supply by your judgment what you could not fulfill.
Yet the little book — the friend who, as I think, caused it to reach you snatched it from me not yet from the hand of a copyist, but still from the hand of a shorthand-writer, so uncorrected and raw that you would not easily note whether you should be angry rather at the faults of the author or of the scribe. Wherefore the little work itself, drawn up on parchment and not yet polished with as much correction as I had wished, I have quickly dispatched, lest I make a delay for my own desire. If indeed it pleases you — not only as lovers, but as judges — since among strangers there will perhaps not be lacking one whom the envy of a bold endeavor touches, it abundantly suffices me that you feel what I desire, because, just as it redounds no less to my glory than to yours to make illustrious the common work of Sollius:
so, with Christ favoring, as you more and more flourish in military exploit, if in the least things it accomplishes something more subtle worthy of reading, then even without me it would be whatever Arcadius need not be ashamed of.