Miscellaneous Letters.
Letter LIV.
Ep. LIV.
On Laconicism. To be laconic is not merely, as you suppose, to write few words, but to say a great deal in few words. Thus I call Homer very brief and Antimachus lengthy. Why? Because I measure the length by the matter and not by the letters.
Edition and rights
NPNF2-07. Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen. Historical English edition; series volume first published 1894.
Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, translators
Ancient work and historical English translation: public domain in the United States (published before 1931). Copyright rules vary by country. This is a historical source transcription, not an official Church edition. Modern website material is not reproduced.
Historical footnotes and publisher introductions are omitted. Author-written openings are retained. Paragraph whitespace is normalized. Transcriptions can contain errors; this is not a critical edition. Attribution follows the historical edition, not universal scholarly agreement.
Digitization provenance (not an external reading link): https://www.ccel.org/ccel/s/schaff/npnf207.xml
Source section: iv.iv.viii.v · Text SHA-256: 90da95d8dde377f98e52ef2e1a6ab403c910d4cd776336ea344107a97176a581