Letter 14: Aeneas praises John for encouraging virtue without harshness.
I enjoyed the vegetables now more than I once enjoyed a ring of honey and almonds. Back then, the accusation made against the boy took away the sweetness of the honey. Now the gentleness of your character made the vegetables seem golden to me. A father is pleasant when he is not angered by slander, but uses goodwill to call a child toward virtue and to stir the teacher to eager effort.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
ιδ'. Ἰωάννῃ πρεσβυτέρῳ.
Τὰ λάχανα νῦν μᾶλλον εἶδον ἡδέως ἢ πάλαι τὸν ἐκ μέλιτος καὶ ἀμυγδάλου συμπλακέντα κύκλον. τότε μὲν γὰρ ἡ κατὰ τοῦ παιδὸς διαβολὴ ἀφῄρει τοῦ μέλιτος τὴν ἡδονήν, νῦν δὲ ἡ τοῦ τρόπου πραότης χρυσᾶ μοι δοκεῖν ἐποίει τὰ λάχανα. ἡδὺς γὰρ πατὴρ ὁ πρὸς ἀρετὴν παρακαλῶν καὶ τὸν διδάσκαλον ἐγείρων.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern aeneas gaza hercher v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/download/epistolographoih00herc/epistolographoih00herc_djvu.txt
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