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Translated by Bl. Jackson.
St Basil the Great Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 129 Pages
Page 124
Letter CCCXLVIII.
Basil to Libanius.
If gripizein is the same thing as to gain, and this is the meaning of the phrase which your sophistic ingenuity has got from the depths of Plato, consider, my dear sir, who is the more hard to be got from, I who am thus impaled [3281] by your epistolary skill, or the tribe of Sophists, whose craft is to make money out of their words. What bishop ever imposed tribute by his words? What bishop ever made his disciples pay taxes? It is you who make your words marketable, as confectioners make honey-cakes. See how you have made the old man leap and bound! However, to you who make such a fuss about your declamations, I have ordered as many rafters to be supplied as there were fighters at Thermopylae, [3282] all of goodly length, and, as Homer has it, "long-shadowing," [3283] which the sacred Alphaeus has promised to restore. [3284]
Letter CCCXLIX.
Libanius to Basil.
Will you not give over, Basil, packing this sacred haunt of the Muses with Cappadocians, and these redolent of the frost [3285] and snow and all Cappadocia's good things? They have almost made me a Cappadocian too, always chanting their "I salute you."
I must endure, since it is Basil who commands. Know, however, that I am making a careful study of the manners and customs of the country, and that I mean to metamorphose the men into the nobility and the harmony of my Calliope, that they may seem to you to be turned from pigeons into doves.
[3281] With a play on charax, the word used for stakes.
[3282] i.e. three hundred.
[3283] Hom. iii. 346.
[3284] Non illepide auctor epistolae fluvium obstringit restituendi promisso, ut gratuito a se dari ostendat." Ben. note.
[3285] grite, an unknown word. Perhaps akin to kriote. cf. Duncange s.v.
Reference address : https://elpenor.org/basil/letters-3.asp?pg=124
