Letter 61

61. To Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria.

I have read the letter of your holiness, in which you lament the governor of Libya, that man of ill-omened name. And we have bewailed our own country, that it is the mother and nurse of such evils; and we have bewailed also our neighbour Libya, reaping the harvest of our evils, and delivered over to the brutish character of a man who lives at once in cruelty and licentiousness. This, then, was the wisdom of the Preacher: "Woe to you, city, whose king is young" — and here there is something still more grievous — "and whose rulers eat not by night, but in the middle of the day are licentious," more irrational than the beasts, raging after the marriages of others. For that man the scourges await, from the just Judge, to be measured back to him in equal measure — the very scourges that he himself first laid upon God's saints.

He has been made known also to our Church by the letter of your godliness, and all will count him a thing accursed, sharing with him neither fire, nor water, nor shelter — if indeed any good comes to those so possessed by such evil from a common and unanimous condemnation. Sufficient for him is this pillar of record, even the very letters being read everywhere. For we shall not cease to display them to all his kindred and friends and strangers; and assuredly, even if the penalties do not lay hold of him at once, as in the case of Pharaoh, yet at some later time they will bring him a heavy and painful retribution.