Synesius, Letter 115

Synesius of Cyrene (c.370-c.413) was a Neo-Platonic philosopher who became bishop of Ptolemais in the Cyrenaica. He left behind a small corpus of texts that offer much information about daily life in Late Antiquity, and about the christianization of the Roman world.

Letter 115, offered here in the translation by A. Fitzgerald, is too short to understand.

Letter 115: On Want

[1] To the Doctor Theodorus

Scarcity of food is a good forced upon us. Someone else might even scoff at the idea, but that is not permitted to you, the admirer of Hippocrates, who defined want as the mother of health.