An After-Dinner Story About Damasus’s Council

What nonsense this is, out of which they make up a charge against me! It hardly seems worth noticing. It is a story about me, concerning the council held by Damasus, bishop of Rome, and I am attacked in it under the name of “a certain friend of his.” Damasus had given me some papers about church affairs to have copied. The story describes a trick played by the Apollinarians. They borrowed one of these papers, a book of Athanasius in which the words dominicus homo, “the Lord’s man,” occur, and they tampered with it by first scratching the words out and then writing them in again over the erasure, so that it would look, not as if they had tampered with the book, but as if I had added the words. I beg you, my dearest friend: in these matters of serious concern to the church, where the truth of doctrine is in question and we are looking for the authority of those who went before us for the good of our souls, put away silly stuff of this kind, and do not take mere after-dinner stories as if they were arguments. For it is quite possible that, even after you have heard the true story from me, someone else who does not know it may declare that it is made up, and composed by you in elegant language, like a mime of Philistion or a song of Lentulus or Marcellus. [a]