Letter 187: Twice cabbage is death, says the unkind proverb. I, however, though I have called for it often, shall die once. Yes: even though I had never called for it at all!

Had you been for a long time considering how best you could reply to my letter about yours, you could not in my judgment have acquitted yourself better than by writing as you have written now. You call me a sophist, and you allege that it is a sophist's business to make small things great and great things small. And you maintain that the object ...

(An attack had been made in Gregory's presence on the orthodoxy of Basil in respect of the Deity of God the Holy Ghost; and in this letter he gives his friend an account of the way in which he had defended him. Unfortunately Basil was not pleased with the letter, taking it as intended to convey reproach under the guise of friendly sympathy.) Fro...

To Basil [most scholars identify this as Basil of Caesarea, later one of the great Cappadocian Fathers of the...

(Written about the same time, in reply to another letter now lost.) I do not like being joked about Tiberina and its mud and its winters, O my friend, who are so free from mud, and who walk on tiptoe, and trample on the plains. You who have wings and are borne aloft, and fly like the arrows of Abaris, in order that, Cappadocian though you are, y...

1. After some little time a young Cappadocian has reached me. One gain to me is that he is a Cappadocian.