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| Your shameful taunt that I wished to get copies of your Apology by bribing your Secretary is an imputation to me of practices which are your own.
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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
Crœsus3159
and Darius?3160
who is there that does not tremble when he is suddenly confronted with
a Demaratus3161
or a Crassus?3162
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
Danaë3163
| 3163 Jove was said to have seduced Danaë by changing himself into
a shower of gold. | was broken down, that which had
more power with Gihazi than his master’s sacred character, that
for which Judas betrayed his Master.3164
| 3164 Jerome often taunts Rufinus with being rich and luxurious. See
Letter cxxv, 18. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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