To Aspar, Former Consul and Patrician

To the other good deeds of your excellency must be added this: you have informed our pious and most Christian emperor, whom God’s grace has appointed for the blessing of his subjects, of the enormous wrong done to me, and by a righteous edict you have canceled an edict that was nothing of the kind. Supported by divine providence, I have made what they reckoned a punishment into a means of good, and I have welcomed my rest with delight. All the same, I have been treated wrongly and illegally. I was not guilty on a single point of the errors the enemies of the truth slanderously laid at my door, yet I was made to suffer the penalty of the worst criminals. In fact my fate has been harder than theirs. I was judged without a trial; I was condemned in my absence; when the emperor’s orders forbade me to go to Ephesus, I received the most righteous sentence of my holy judges. [a]

All this has now been undone by his most serene majesty, through the active intervention of your excellency. For my part, feeling that it would be wrong to keep silent and not offer you my thanks, I have taken this letter as my means of doing so. In it I beg your excellency to speak warmly on my behalf both to the victorious and Christian emperor and to the very godly and pious Augusta. On their behalf I implore our good Lord, as earnestly as I can, to keep their empire secure, and to grant that it may be at once a loving protection for their subjects and a terror to their foes, and to establish an honorable peace for all. May your excellency be moved to petition them to put a complete end to the unrest of the church and to order the council to assemble: not, like the last, of men whose unruly habits throw the synod into confusion, but, in peace and quiet, of members instructed in divine things, who are used to confirming the apostolic decrees and rejecting whatever is spurious and at odds with the truth. And I express this hope so that your excellency may reap the good such a course of action is likely to bring.