Letter 133
To Olympius
Just the other day, during the recent consulship of Aristaenetus and
of-- I don't know the name of his colleague-- I received a letter sealed with your seal,
and singed with your sacred name. But I conjecture it was a very old one, for it was
worm-eaten, and the words for the most part were illegible. I wish very much that you
would not content yourself with merely sending me one letter a year, as a sort of tribute,
and that you would not take our friend Syrus for your only postman. In this way nothing
comes to me in its pristine freshness, everything seems stale. Do, therefore, as I do-- no
messenger of the Court changes his horses and leaves our city, without his bag being made
heavier by some letter of mine addressed to your eloquent self. Whether all or only some
of them give you my letters, may those who put them in your hands be ever blest! they are
excellent men. But if they do otherwise, you will then be the wiser, inasmuch as you will
not put faith in faithless men. But that I may not uselessly weary my secretary in
dictating letters to him that you will never receive, I should like to be sure about this.
I shall in that case arrange things differently in the future, and
entrust them to Peter alone. I think Peter will on this letter through the agency of the
sacred hand, for I am sending it from Pentapolis to our common teacher. She will choose
the man by whom she wishes it be conveyed, and her choice, I am sure, will fall upon the
most trusted messenger. We do not know, my dearest and best friend, if we shall ever have
a chance of conversing together again. The cowardice of our generals has delivered up our
country to the enemy without a single battle; there are no survivors except those of us
who have seized fortified places. Those who have been captured in the plains have been
butchered like victims for sacrifice. We are now afraid of a prolonged siege, lest it
should compel most of the fortresses to surrender to thirst. This is the reason why I did
not answer your counter-charges on the subject of the presents. I had no leisure, for I
was taken up with a machine which I am constructing, that we may hurl long-distance
missiles from the turrets, stones of really substantial weight. I shall leave you,
however, entirely at liberty to send me gifts, for of course Synesius must yield to
Olympius, but they must not be gifts of a luxurious sort. I disapprove of the luxury of
the quarters assigned to the company. Send me, then, things that are useful for soldiers,
such as bows and arrows, and above all arrows with heads attached to them. As far as the
bows are concerned, I can at a pinch buy them elsewhere, or repair those which I have
already, but it is not easy to procure arrows, I mean really good ones. The Egyptian
arrows that we have bulge at the knots and sink in between the knots, so that they deviate
from their right course. They are like men starting in a foot-race, who from the very
start are hampered and stumble; but those which are manufactured in your country are long
and deftly turned on the pattern of a single cylinder; and this means everything for the
straight course of their flight. Now this is what you ought to send me, and at the same
time some serviceable bits for my horses. That Italian horse whose praises you set forth
in such beautiful language, I would have very gladly seen, if he will give us, as you
promise, some excellent colts. However, at the end of your letter, in a postscript, I read
that you were obliged to leave him at Seleucia, because the captain of your vessel refused
to embark such a cargo on account of the bad weather; but as I recognize neither a style
resembling your own, nor your hand, nor the precision of your script, I think I ought to
warn you of the fact. It would be absurd if such a fine horse were preserved neither for
you nor for me.