Letter 67: The man delivering this letter to you is a decent person who took on business from which others would have profited,...
To Florentius. (359)
The man who is delivering this letter to you is a fair and decent person, who, in matters from which it was possible to make a profit, presided over them not for profit. I myself have often called upon him as an ally, and nowhere have I found him slack. And indeed I urged him to do the opposite of the proverb, and to mount upon horses, leaving the mules behind [literally: "to the horses from the mules"]. So do you become master over this for us as quickly as possible, and make the man a cavalryman. You will say that I, in putting him to the test, do not know how to praise even bad men.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
Φλωρεντίῳ. (359)
Ἀνήρ ἐστιν ἐπιεικὴς ὁ διδούς σοι τὴν ἐπιστολὴν καὶ
πραγμάτων ἀφ’ ὦν ἦν κερδαίνειν οὐκ ἐπὶ κέρδει προστάς.
ἐγὼ δὲ αὐτὸν πολλαχοῦ μὲν ἐκάλεσα σύμμαχον, εὗρον δὲ οὐ-
δαμοῦ ῥᾴθυμον.
καὶ παρῄνεσά γε αὐτῷ τοὐναντίον ποιῆσαι
τῇ παροιμίᾳ καὶ ἐφ’ ἵππους ἀπὸ τῶν ἴνων. σὺ δ’ ἡμῖν κυ-
ριος ὡς τάχιστα Μαὶ τὸν ἄνδρα ἱππέα. φήσεις δέ με πεῖραν
αὐτοῦ λαμβάνων ὡς οὐκ οἶδα ἐπαινεῖν κακούς.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern libanius retranslated v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek/blob/master/volume_xml/libanius_10.xml
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