Letter 611: So you weren't actually longing for the speeches — you just wanted to be seen longing for them.

LibaniusPalladios|c. 372 AD|Libanius|AI-assisted
friendship

To Palladius. (361 AD)

So you weren't actually longing for the speeches — you just wanted to be seen longing for them. You couldn't bring yourself to leave a single servant here for even one day. But I'm sending them anyway, to someone who has no need of them. Because it's obvious: the next time we met, you'd have been pretending to desire them all over again and reproaching me.

AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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

Παλλαδίῳ. (361)

Οὐκ ἄρα τῶν λόγων ἐπεθύμεις, ἀλλὰ τοῦ δοκεῖν ἐπιθυμεῖν
τῶν λόγων. οὔκουν ἐτόλμησας οἰκέτην τῇδε καταλιπεῖν ἡμέ-
ραν μίαν. ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ καὶ μηδὲν δεομένῳ πέμπω. δῆλον γὰρ
ὡς αὖθις ἐντυχὼν ἐρᾶν πλαττόμενος ἐπετίμας ἄν.

Revision history

  1. 2026-03-20v2.1.0-import

    Initial corpus import from AI-assisted translation from original text.

    Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek/blob/master/volume_xml/libanius_10.xml

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