Letter 6015: The fortunes of our shared homeland have been reduced to such dire straits that the worst must be avoided.

Quintus Aurelius SymmachusUnknown|c. 372 AD|Quintus Aurelius Symmachus|AI-assisted
illnesstravel mobility

The fortune of our common homeland has been brought into such straits that the worst extremities must be avoided. And so I desire to send your brother back to you without delay, for whom may you deign soon to furnish mule-drawn litters [basternae, covered traveling litters carried by mules], so that his haste may be assisted by the support of the pack-animals. For the rest, my daughter ought not to be wearied by the journey, as I had written before, since after a grave illness her health must be restored by leisure and quiet. Farewell.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

In eas angustias communis patriae fortuna deducta est, ut extrema vitanda sint.

itaque fratrem vestrum continuo ad vos opto dimittere, cui bastemarios mox praebere

dignamini, ut festinatio eius iumentomm adminiculis adiuvetur. ceterum filiam meam

vexari itinere, sicuti ante scripseram, non oportet, quoniam post incommodum grave

25 valetudo eius otio et quiete refovenda est. vale.

XVI (XVU) a. 397.

Revision history

  1. 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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