Letter 5005: I took up your letter with great eagerness, since a long silence had built up my desire for news.
I hesitate to submit my writings to your eloquence, but I am equally careful not to refuse anything of mine to your affection. I have therefore sent you two short speeches recently published by me. One of them restrained a candidate who was resisting his appointment to the urban magistracy; the other took as its subject a censorial judgment that had long ago been condemned by decree of the Senate. But after the case was decided, I expanded the opinion I had delivered into a fuller work. Do not hold it against me that I upheld the rejection of old-fashioned severity. For certain things, impressive only in name, cause great harm in practice and experience. You will find the reasoning behind my position as you read. I ask only that you approach the examination of what I have written with fairness to both sides. The argument of the speech will deserve, I hope, that even you, a champion of ancient ways, extend your hand to the authority of the Senate.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed.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
Vereor eloquentiae tuae scripta nostra committere, sed non minus caveo amori
tuo meorum quidquam negare. duas igitur oratiunculas nuper editas a nobis misi.
earum una ad urbanos fasces resultantem tenuit candidatum, alteri argumentum dedit
iam pridem decreto senatus inprobata censura. sed iudicium meum, cum res acta
2 est, habitum propagavi opere largiore. nec mihi vitio vortas priscae severitatis repul- 20
sam. nam quaedam solis speciosa nominibus usu et experiundo plurimum nocent.
rationes sententiae meae lector invenies. volo tmtum ad inspectionem dictorum parti
utrique aequus accedas. merebitur, ut spero, orationis adsertio, ut tu etiam vetustatis
patronus auctoritati ordinis manum porrigas.
X a. 398. 25
Revision history
- 2026-03-20v2.1.0-import
Initial corpus import from Seeck edition OCR from Internet Archive.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/qaureliisymmach00seecgoog
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