Your First Accusers

I now come to the most serious charge of all, in which you accuse me of breaking faith after our friendship was restored. I confess that of all the reproaches you bring against me or threaten me with, there is none I would so much wish to be clear of as that of fraud, deceit, and breach of faith. To sin is human; to lay snares is devilish. What! Was it for this that I joined hands with you over the slain lamb in the Church of the Resurrection, that I might “steal your manuscripts at Rome”? Or that I might “send out my dogs to gnaw away your papers before they were corrected”? Can anyone believe that we got the accusers ready before you had committed the crime? Is it supposed that we knew what plans you were turning over in your heart, or what another man had been dreaming, or how the Greek proverb, “The pig teaches Minerva,” was being fulfilled in your case? If I sent Eusebius to bark at you, who then stirred up the anger of Aterbius and others against you? Is it not a fact that he thought I too was a heretic because of my friendship with you? And when I had given him satisfaction about the heresies of Origen, you shut yourself up at home and never dared to meet him, for fear that you would have to condemn what you did not wish to condemn, or else, by openly resisting him, lay yourself open to the charge of heresy. Do you think he cannot be called as a witness against you because he is your accuser? Before the reverend bishop Epiphanius ever came to Jerusalem and gave you the signs of peace by word and kiss, “yet having evil thoughts and guile in his heart”; before I translated for him that letter which was such a reproof to you, in which he wrote you down a heretic though he had earlier approved you as orthodox: before all this, Aterbius was barking at you in Jerusalem. And if he had not quickly taken himself off, he would have felt not your literary cudgel but the stick you flourish in your right hand to drive the dogs away. [a]