Letter 1005: A teacherly handoff praising a student's speech, discipline, and promise.
Receive your son, who has acquired power in speech because effort has been added to his natural ability - some of it his own, some of it mine. I worked on him gladly, both because I owed him a reward and because I believed that training him in self-control would count as one. He has indeed become self-controlled, and that in spite of such a handsome appearance. This is a gain for a teacher, and it could make my circle larger. He has come to you, then, as such a young man. Through you let him acquire the other things that remain: things inferior to eloquence, but which most people think lead more directly to good fortune.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Φήλικι. (391)
1, Δέχου τὸν υἱὸν λόγων κτησάμενον δύναμιν τῇ φύσει
16 προστεϑέντων πόνων, τῶν μὲν ἐκείνου, τῶν δὲ ἐμοῦ. ἐπόνουν
δὲ περὶ αὐτὸν ἡδέως διὰ τὸ καὶ μισϑὸν ὀφείλειν αὐτῷ τοῦ
σωφρονεῖν νομίξειν. σεσωφρόνηκε γάρ, καὶ ταῦτα ἐπὶ εἴδει
τοιούτῳ. τουτὶ γὰρ κέρδος διδασκάλῳ καὶ δύναιτ᾽ ἂν μείζω
ποιεῖν τὸν χορόν. ὥ. ἀφῖκται μὲν οὖν σοι τοιοῦτος, διὰ σοῦ
δὲ χτάσϑω τὰ ἄλλα ἃ λείπεται μὲν λόγων, δοκεῖ δὲ τοῖς πολ-
λοῖς μᾶλλον ἐπ᾽ εὐδαιμονίαν ἄγειν.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern libanius foerster vol11 batch10 t260 reviewed v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/download/foerster-libanii-opera/Foerster%20%281922%29%2C%20Libanii%20opera%2011_djvu.xml
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