Letter 116

116. To Firminus

Your letters are both rare and brief — whether from reluctance to write, or because you are managing in some other way to escape the surfeit that comes from too much, or perhaps because you are training yourself toward brevity. To us, however, nothing is enough; even should it overflow in quantity, it falls short of our desire, because we wish to learn each particular about you: how your body fares, how the matters of your discipline stand, and whether you persevere in the resolutions made from the first, or have changed your mind, shifting your purpose in response to circumstances.

If, then, you had remained the same as yourself, we would not be asking for a quantity of letters, but this much would have sufficed us: "So-and-so to so-and-so: know that we are in health, and farewell." But since we hear what we are ashamed even to mention — that you, abandoning the rank of your blessed forefathers, are deserting to your paternal grandfather, and are eager to become a Brettanius instead of a Firminus — we long to hear these very things, and to learn the reasonings by which you were led to take this road of life. But since you yourself have kept silent out of shame at the design, we exhort you neither to plan anything worthy of shame, and, if anything has crept into your mind, to drive it from your thoughts and to become yourself again; and, bidding a long farewell to military service and arms and the hardships of camp, to take possession of your homeland, judging it enough for security of life and for every distinction to hold sway over the city on equal terms with your forefathers — which we are persuaded will come to you without effort, looking both to your natural fitness for it and to the absence of any who stand in the way. Whether, then, the design never arose at all, or, having arisen, has been cast off again, let us know quickly. But if — which God forbid — the same plans remain, let the calamity come to us as its own messenger; of a letter we have no need.