Letter 3018: You are certainly blessed with natural gifts and intellectual talent, but even you will find it hard to excuse such...

You abound, to be sure, in natural gifts and in the faculties of talent, but it is difficult even for you to clear yourself of the fault of unbroken silence. For what can be alleged, whether from truth or from invention? Long journeys, you will say, detained me: but there was often a pause, and at some point an arrival. I expend wakeful effort upon public affairs: but every business is divided by alternating intervals of leisure. It remains—what I least wish—that you confess a neglect of friendship. For if you abandon your duties for the most part, it is preoccupation; if always, it is forgetfulness. Do you think I am being put off? If this could be the case, I would keep silent. Do you then make sport of my patience? And yet you ought to understand that an even-tempered spirit should be rewarded at a higher price. He is wronged the more undeservedly whom scruple does not permit to take offense. And surely it concerned your own solicitude to put forth some words of familiar affection, since an oration issuing from your writing-cases was being entrusted to me. About this I will for the present keep you in suspense, intending to give you a token of the public verdict only at last—when you shall have entreated me, when you shall have deserved it, and, because I value your letters so highly, when you shall have written. Farewell. [Editorial note: Book 16(?), year A.D. 380.]