Letter 76

76. To Sophronius the Master.

The greatness of the calamities that have overtaken my native country compelled me, when I reached the camp, to lay before your nobility of soul, and before all the rest of you who hold the highest power over affairs, the despondency that grips our city. But since bodily illness and the care of the churches detain me, I have hastened, for the time being, to pour out my grief in writing to your magnanimity, knowing well that no ship swallowed up by violent winds in the open sea ever vanished so suddenly, no city ground to nothing by earthquakes or flooded over by waters ever passed into so instantaneous a ruin, as ours has been engulfed by this strange new ordering of affairs and reduced to utter destruction. Our condition has become a byword. For our civic body is gone; and the whole order of the city, abandoning, in its dejection toward the rulers, its dwelling in the town, now wanders through the countryside. Even the provision of necessities has at last failed, and altogether a most untimely spectacle has come about: a city that once gloried in its men of learning and in everything else by which prosperous cities live free from want.

We have judged that one consolation, as far as is possible amid such evils, remains to us: to groan over our sufferings to your gentleness, and to entreat you, if there be any power to do so, to stretch out a hand to our city, which has been brought to its knees. As for the means by which you might come to the aid of our affairs at the right moment, I myself am not able to suggest it; but for you, by your sagacity, it will be altogether easy to find it, and, by the power given you from God, no hard matter to make use of what you have found.