Letter 346: You yourself will judge whether I have added anything in the way of learning to the young men whom you have sent. I hope that this addition, however little it be, will get the credit of being great, for the sake of your friendship towards me. But inasmuch as you give less praise to learning than to temperance and to a refusal to abandon our soul...

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 ...

(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...

(Shortly after the events described above, Basil determined to strengthen his own hands by creating a number of new Bishoprics in the disputed Province, to one of which, Sasima, he consecrated Gregory, very much against the will of the latter, who felt that he had been hardly used, and did not attempt to disguise his reluctance. See Gen. Prolegg.

To Basil [this letter is widely considered spurious — a later forgery attributed to Julian].

(The new Archbishop seems not to have been satisfied with the reasons given in Gregory's last letter; so the latter writes again.) How can any affairs of yours be mere grape-gleanings to me, O dear and sacred friend? What a word has escaped the fence of your teeth, or how could you dare to say such a thing, if I too may be somewhat daring? How c...