Nilus of Ancyra→Thalassius (correspondent of Nilus of Ancyra)|c. 415 AD|nilus ancyra|From Ancyra|AI-assisted
To Thalassius the Silver-dealer [argyroprates, a banker or money-changer].
How is it that certain sorcerers, having set a certain wandering man upon a tomb, dispatched him away into foreign nations as though to his homeland, while darkness lay over everything? It is plain that, by the wicked invocation and by the power of natural things, a demon took up the man and conveyed him elsewhere. So too, then, the magicians often seem to turn a man into a beast, not by transforming the very substance of the body, but by putting around him the form of a beast. Therefore, even if the man is saddled, as it were, within that form, he bears as much as he is able as a man, while the demon lifts up upon his own shoulders all the rest.
To Thalassius the Silver-dealer [argyroprates, a banker or money-changer].
How is it that certain sorcerers, having set a certain wandering man upon a tomb, dispatched him away into foreign nations as though to his homeland, while darkness lay over everything? It is plain that, by the wicked invocation and by the power of natural things, a demon took up the man and conveyed him elsewhere. So too, then, the magicians often seem to turn a man into a beast, not by transforming the very substance of the body, but by putting around him the form of a beast. Therefore, even if the man is saddled, as it were, within that form, he bears as much as he is able as a man, while the demon lifts up upon his own shoulders all the rest.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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.