Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume VIII/The Letters/Letter 84

To the President.

1.&#160; will hardly believe what I am about to write, but it must be written for truth&#8217;s sake.&#160; I have been very anxious to communicate as often as possible with your excellency, but when I got this opportunity of writing a letter I did not at once seize the lucky chance.&#160; I hesitated and hung back.&#160; What is astonishing is, that when I got what I had been praying for, I did not take it.&#160; The reason of this is that I am really ashamed to write to you every time, not out of pure friendship, but with the object of getting something.&#160; But then I bethought me (and when you consider it, I do hope you will not think that I communicate with you more for the sake of a bargain than of friendship) that there must be a difference between the way in which one approaches a magistrate and a private man.&#160; We do not accost a physician as we do any mere nobody; nor a magistrate as we do a private individual.&#160; We try to get some advantage from the skill of the one and the position of the other.&#160; Walk in the sun, and your shadow will follow you, whether you will or not.&#160; Just so intercourse with the great is followed by an inevitable gain, the succour of the distressed.&#160; The first object of my letter is fulfilled in my being able to greet your excellency.&#160; Really, if I had no other cause for writing at all, this must be regarded as an excellent topic.&#160; Be greeted then, my dear Sir; may you be preserved by all the world while you fill office after office, and succour now some now others by your authority.&#160; Such greeting I am wont to make; such greeting is only due to you from all who have had the least experience of your goodness in your administration.

2.&#160; Now, after this prayer, hear my supplication on behalf of the poor old man whom the imperial order had exempted from serving in any public capacity; though really I might say that old age anticipated the Emperor in giving him his discharge.&#160; You have yourself satisfied the boon conferred on him by the higher authority, at once from respect to natural infirmity, and, I think, from regard to the public interest, lest any harm should come to the state from a man growing imbecile through age.&#160; But how, my dear Sir, have you unwittingly dragged him into public life, by ordering his grandson, a child not yet four years old, to be on the roll of the senate?&#160; You have done the very same thing as to drag the old man, through his descendant, again into public business.&#160; But now, I do implore you, have mercy on both ages, and free both on the ground of what in each case is pitiable.&#160; The one never saw father or mother, never knew them, but from his very cradle was deprived of both, and has entered into life by the help of strangers:&#160; the other has been preserved so long as to have suffered every kind of calamity.&#160; He saw a son&#8217;s untimely death; he saw a house without successors; now, unless you devise some remedy commensurate with your kindness, he will see the very consolation of his bereavement made an occasion of innumerable troubles, for, I suppose, the little lad will never act as senator, collect tribute, or pay troops; but once again the old man&#8217;s white hairs must be shamed.&#160; Concede a favour in accordance with the law and agreeable to nature; order the boy to be allowed to wait till he come to man&#8217;s estate, and the old man to await death quietly on his bed.&#160; Let others, if they will, urge the pretext of press of business and inevitable necessity.&#160; But, even if you are under a press of business, it would not be like you to despise the distressed, to slight the law, or to refuse to yield to the prayers of your friends.