Siricius Is Dead, Anastasius Is Living

You produce a letter of Siricius, who now sleeps in Christ, and you despise the letter of the living Anastasius. What harm, you ask, can it do you that he should have written, or perhaps not written at all, without your knowing it? If he did write, it is still enough for you that you have the witness of the whole world in your favor, and that no one thinks the bishop of so great a city capable of wronging an innocent man, or even one who was simply absent. You call yourself innocent, though your translation made all Rome shudder. You say you were absent, but only because you do not dare to answer when you are accused. And you so shrink from the judgment of the city of Rome that you would rather expose yourself to an invasion of the barbarians than to the opinion of a peaceful city. Suppose last year’s letter was forged by me: who then wrote the letters lately received in the East? Yet in these last Pope Anastasius pays you such compliments that, when you read them, you will be more inclined to set about defending yourself than accusing me. [a]

I should like you to consider how inescapable is the wisdom you are trying to avoid, and the Attic salt and eloquence of your style in religious writing. You are attacked by others, pierced through by their condemnation, yet it is against me that you thrash about in your fury, saying: “I could tell a tale about the manner of your departure from Rome: what was said about you at the time and written about you afterward, about your oath, the place where you boarded ship, the pious way you avoided committing perjury. All this I could enlarge on, but I have decided to hold back more than I tell.” These are samples of your pleasant speeches. And if after this I say anything sharp in reply, you threaten me with immediate proscription and with the sword. You are a most eloquent man, with all the tricks of rhetoric. You pretend to pass over things you are really revealing, so that what you cannot prove by an open charge you may make into a crime by seeming to set it aside. All this is your simplicity. This is what you mean by sparing your friend and saving your statements for the court of justice: you spare me by heaping up a mass of charges against me.