Letter 14

14. To Gregory, his friend

When my brother Gregory wrote to me that you had long wished to meet us, and added that this same thing had been resolved by you as well, I—partly because I am reluctant to believe, having often been deceived, and partly because I was distracted by occupations—was unable to wait. For I must now depart for Pontus, where perhaps at last, God willing, we shall put an end to our wandering. For at length, having given up the vain hopes I once had in you—or rather the dreams, if one must speak more truly, for I praise the man who said that hopes are the waking dreams of those who sleep—I went off to Pontus in search of a way of life. There indeed God has shown me a place exactly suited to my disposition, so that I see in reality such a thing as we often, in idleness and play, are accustomed to fashion in the mind.

For there is a high mountain covered with deep forest, watered toward the north by cold and clear streams. At its foot a level plain is spread out, continually made fertile by the moisture from the mountain. A forest of varied and all kinds of trees, growing of itself around it, becomes almost a fence to it, so that even the island of Calypso, which Homer plainly admired above all others for beauty, is small in comparison. For indeed it falls little short of being an island, since it is hedged about with defences on every side: deep ravines have broken away from it on two sides, and along its flank the river, flowing down from a cliff, is itself a wall, continuous and hard to cross; while on the other side the mountain, stretched out and joined to the ravines by crescent-shaped bends, walls off the approaches of the foot of the hill. There is one entrance to it, of which we are masters. And the dwelling itself a certain other ridge receives, holding up a lofty crest at its summit, so that the plain is spread out beneath the eyes from it, and from on high one may behold the river flowing around—affording, to my mind, no less delight than to those who look at the Strymon from Amphipolis. For the one, spreading into a lake with its more leisurely current, has almost been deprived even of being a river by its stillness; but the other, flowing the swiftest of any rivers I know, is for a little roughened by the neighbouring rock, from which it pours back and is wound into a deep eddy, affording a sight most pleasant to me and to every beholder, and a most ample resource to the people of the place, since it nourishes an untold multitude of fish in its eddies.

What need is there to tell of the exhalations from the earth, or the breezes from the river? The multitude of flowers, or of singing birds, another might admire; but I have no leisure to give my mind to these things. The greatest thing we can say of the place, however, is that, though suited by the favourableness of its situation to every kind of produce, it nourishes for me, the sweetest of all fruits, stillness; not only because it is free from the tumults of the town, but because it sends no traveller our way except those who mingle with us in hunting. For besides everything else it is also a nurse of game—not of bears or of wolves, your kind (God forbid), but it feeds herds of deer and wild goats and hares, and whatever is like these.

Do you not think, then, what danger I, the foolish one, was in, when I contended to exchange for such a place Tiberina, that pit of the inhabited world? You will pardon me, then, for now hastening toward it. For surely not even Alcmaeon, when he had found the Echinades, could endure his wandering any longer.