50. To Nilus, surnamed Dionysius
Your earlier silence was more creditable than your present defence; for then you did not utter abuse, though perhaps it was in your mind. But now, as though you were in travail, you have poured out your abuse of me wholesale. For must I not regard it as abuse and slander that you supposed me to be like your own friends, to each of whom you offered yourself uninvited; or rather, by the first you were not invited, and you obeyed the second on his merely indicating that he wished to enlist you to help him. However, whether I am like Constans and Magnentius the event itself, as they say, will prove. But as for you, from what you wrote it is very plain that, in the words of the comic poet, "You are praising yourself, lady, like Astydamas." For when you write about your "fearlessness" and "great courage," and say "Would that you knew my real value and my true character!" and, in a word, all that sort of thing, — for shame! What an empty noise and display of words is this! Nay, by the Graces and Aphrodite, if you are so brave and noble, why were you "so careful to avoid incurring displeasure," if need be, "for the third time"? For when men fall under the displeasure of princes, the lightest consequence — and, as one might say, the most agreeable to a man of sense — is that they are at once relieved from the cares of business; and if they have to pay a small fine as well, their stumbling block is merely money; while the culmination of the prince's wrath, and the "fate beyond all remedy" as the saying is, is to lose their lives. Disregarding all these dangers, because, as you say, "you had come to know me in my private capacity for the man I am" — and in my common and generic capacity for the human being I am, though unknown to myself, late learner that I am! — why, in heaven's name, did you say that you were careful to avoid incurring displeasure for the third time? For surely my anger will not change you from a good man into a bad. I should be enviable indeed, and with justice, if I had the power to do that; for then, as Plato says, I could do the converse as well. But since virtue owns no master, you ought not to have taken into account anything of the 'sort. However, you think it is a fine thing to speak ill of all men, and to abuse all without exception, and to convert the shrine of peace into a workshop of war. Or do you think in this way to excuse yourself in the sight of all for your past sins, and that your courage now is a screen to hide your cowardice of old? You have heard the fable of Babrius: "Once upon a time a weasel fell in love with a handsome youth.". The rest of the fable you may learn from the book. However much you may say, you will never convince any human being that you were not what you were, and such as many knew you to be in the past. As for your ignorance and audacity now, it was not philosophy that implanted them in you, no, by heaven! On the contrary, it was what Plato calls a twofold lack of knowledge. For though you really know nothing, just as I know nothing, you think forsooth that you are the wisest of all men, not only of those who are alive now, but also of those who have ever been, and perhaps of those who ever will be. To such a pitch of ignorance has your self-conceit grown!