Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

To a Magistrate. 2287
Letter LXXXIII. 2286
I have had only a short acquaintance and intercourse with your lordship, but I have no
small or contemptible knowledge of you from the reports through which I am brought into
communication with many men of position and importance. You yourself are better able
to say whether I, by report, am of any account with you. At all events your reputation with
me is such as I have said. But since God has called you to an occupation which gives you
opportunity of showing kindness, and in the exercise of which it lies in your power to bring
about the restoration of my own city, now level with the ground, it is, I think, only my duty
to remind your excellency that in the hope of the requital God will give, you should show
yourself of such a character as to win a memory that cannot die, and be made an inheritor
of everlasting rest, in consequence of your making the afflictions of the distressed hard to
bear. I have a property at Chamanene, and I beg you to look after its interests as though
they were your own. And pray do not be surprised at my calling my friend’s property my
own, for among other virtues I have been taught that of friendship, and I remember the
author of the wise saying a friend is another self. 2288 I therefore commend to your excellency
this property belonging to my friend, as though it were my own. I beg you to consider the
misfortunes of the house, and both to grant them consolation for the past, and for the future
to make the place more comfortable for them; for it is now left and abandoned on account
of the weight of the rates imposed upon it. I will do my best to meet your excellency and
converse with you on points of detail.
2286 Placed in 372.
2287 Censitor, i.e. the magistrate responsible for rating and taxation in the provinces.
2288 cf. Aristotle Eth. Nic. viii. 12, 3; and Cic. Lœl. xxi. So, amicus est tanquam alter idem.
To a Magistrate.
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