To Vitalis, Defensor of Sardinia, on Januarius’s Advisers and the Wheat

Gregory to Vitalis, and so on.

The bearers of this letter, as well as the copies of our letters, will tell you well enough what we have learned about our brother the bishop Januarius. So let your experience carry out with good judgment the excommunication we have decreed to be pronounced on his perverse advisers, so that by falling they may learn not to walk carelessly. [b]

Further, we have sent back by Redemptus the defensor, the bearer of this letter, the wheat that was sent to us under the name of a present. Your experience is to see that neither you nor the man who brought it presume to take any part of it for yourselves as a bounty. Restore the whole of it, without any deduction, to the persons concerned, to each separately or to all together, and send me their receipts for its value. For if I find that anything has been done other than as I direct, I will punish the offense with no slight severity. [c]