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 3159 and Darius? 3160 who is there that does not tremble when he is suddenly confronted with a Demaratus 3161 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 p. 521 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 3163 was broken down, that which had more power with Gihazi than his master’s sacred character, that for which Judas betrayed his Master. 3164

Footnotes

Kings of Lydia and Persia notorious for their wealth.

Kings of Lydia and Persia notorious for their wealth.

Father of Tarquinius Priscus, said to have been a wealthy immigrant from Corinth.

The triumvir: surnamed the Rich: murdered in Persia b.c. 52.

Jove was said to have seduced Danaë by changing himself into a shower of gold.

Jerome often taunts Rufinus with being rich and luxurious. See Letter cxxv, 18.