4. Your letter goes
on:
“Pray do not trouble
yourself to give a large sum of gold to bribe my secretary, as your
friends did in the case of my papers containing the Περὶ
᾽Αρχῶν, before
they had been corrected and brought to completion, so that they might
more easily falsify documents which no one possessed, or at least very
few. Accept the document which I send you gratis, though you would be
glad to pay a large sum to buy it.”
I should have thought you would
be ashamed of such a beginning of your work. What! I bribe your
Secretary! Is there any one who would attempt to vie with the wealth of
Crœsus and Darius? who is there that does not tremble when he is suddenly confronted with a Demaratus or a Crassus? Have you become so brazen-faced, that you put your trust in lies and think lies will protect you and that we shall believe every fiction which you choose to frame? Who then was it who stole that letter in which you were so highly praised, from the cell of our brother Eusebius? Whose artfulness was it, and whose accomplices, through which a certain document was found in the lodgings of that Christian woman Fabiola and of that wise man Oceanus, which they themselves had never seen? Do you think that you are innocent because you can cast upon others all the imputations which properly belong to you? Is every one who offends you, however guiltless and harmless he may be, at once held to become a criminal? You think so, I suppose, because you are possessed of that through which the chastity of Danaë was broken down, that which had more power with Gihazi than his master’s sacred character, that for which Judas betrayed his Master.