Letter 5066: It is an act full of piety that you spontaneously anticipate a brother's wish.
It is a duty full of devotion that you anticipate of your own accord your brother's wish. Soon, therefore, our household agents will travel, with the purchase money, to buy up the horses, so that from all the four-horse teams which you have written are for sale, our choice may pick out those superior in their running and powerful in their breeding. But this care must be taken up by you: that the recent reputation of our games should match our past productions. First of all, then, I ask this favor of you: that you weigh the merits rather than the number. For since a sure hope promises me an abundance of horses from the Spains, those which you promise from close at hand ought to be selected with the more untroubled diligence. [...]
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Plenum religionis officium est, quod sponte votum fratris antevenis. proxime igitur
familiares nostri ad equorura coemptionem cum pretiis commeabunt, ut ex omnibus i»
quadrigis, quas scripsisti esse venales, praestantiores cursu et genere pollentes defloret
electio. haec autera tibi cura sumenda est, ut praeteritis editionibus nostris recens
ludorum fama respondeat. inprimis igitur hanc de te gratiam peto^ ne magis numerum
quam merita perpendas. nam cum de Hispaniis copiam mihi equorum spes certa pro-
mittat, hos, quos de proximo polliceris, securior diligentia debet excerpere. is
LXXXm (LXXXI) a. 399.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern symmachus retranslated v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/qaureliisymmach00seecgoog
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