Letter 21: Aeneas asks Dorotheus to support a poor sacred minister.
Most people, as the saying goes, rush into holy things with unwashed feet, like Plato's bald bronze-smith, who still smelled of smoke and foulness when he rose up against his mistress. You, however, pass from holy thing to holy thing, from philosophy to priesthood. The man carrying this letter is also a servant of holy things, and therefore he is yours. He loves quiet, and somehow, after learning that a mountain is consecrated to God because its solitude makes it fit for stillness, he is making his way there. But poverty stands in the way, along with poverty's contrivances. You can undo them by ordering the priests in the middle of the region to support the man until he reaches the mountain.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
κα'. Δωροθέῳ πρεσβυτέρῳ.
Οἱ μὲν πολλοὶ τὸ δὴ λεγόμενον ἀνίπτοις ποσὶν ἐπιπηδῶσι τοῖς ἱεροῖς, καθάπερ ὁ τοῦ Πλάτωνος χαλκεύς. σὺ δὲ ἐξ ἱεροῦ διαβαίνεις εἰς ἱερόν, ἐκ φιλοσοφίας εἰς ἱερωσύνην. ὁ δὲ τὴν ἐπιστολὴν κομίζων ἱερῶν ἐστὶν ὑπηρέτης. ἐρᾷ δὲ ἡσυχίας, καὶ πρὸς τὸ ὄρος πορεύεται· ἀλλ' ἐμποδὼν ἀπορία, ἣν δύνασαι διαλῦσαι.
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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