102 (183). To the Citizens of Satala
SAINT BASIL
have no hope?~ Therefore, be encouraged. Do not succumb to your affiictions, but show that you are superior and have risen above them.
102. To the Citizens of Satata l Constrained by your own appeals and those of the whole people, I took upon myself the care of your church and I promised you before God to leave undone nothing that should come within my power. Therefore, as it is written, I was compelled to touch, as it were, the apple of my eye. ~ Thus, my extraordinary esteem for you permitted me to remember nothing, neither relationship nor my intimacy with the man from childhood, in preference to your demands. On the contrary, I was forgetful of all that existed personally between us as friends. I took no account of the many lamentations uttered by my people when deprived of his leadership, nor of the tears of all his relatives. I did not take to heart the affiiction of his mother, already aged and depending upon his assistance alone. I paid no regard to all these things, so important and at the same time so numerous. I had but one purpose-to adorn your church with the leadership of such a man and to bring it aid, since it had already fallen to its knees because of its long-continued lack of leadership, and needed much able guidance for its restoration. 3
2 Cf. 1 Thess. 4.12.
1 The Benedictines give the year 372 as the date of this letter, but Loafs, op. cit. 20f, places it in 373.
2 Cf. Zach. 2.8.
3 The person of whom St. Basil is thinking is Poemenius. Cf. Letter 122.