2.  For many urgent reasons I felt bound to meet your reverence, both to discuss many things with you and to learn many things from you.  Here it is not possible even to find genuine affection.  And, could one even find a true friend, none can give counsel to me in the present emergency with anything like the wisdom and experience which you have acquired in your many labours on the Church’s behalf.  The rest I must not write.  I may, however, safely say what follows.  The presbyter Evagrius, On Evagrius, known generally as Evagrius of Antioch, to distinguish him from Evagrius the historian, see especially Theodoret, Ecc. Hist. v. 23.  He had travelled to Italy with Eusebius of Vercellæ.  His communication to Basil from the Western bishops must have been disappointing and unsatisfactory.  On his correspondence with Basil, after his return to Antioch, see Letter clvi.  His consecration by the dying Paulinus in 388 inevitably prolonged the disastrous Meletian schism at Antioch. son of Pompeianus of Antioch, who set out some time ago to the West with the blessed Eusebius, has now returned from Rome.  He demands from me a letter couched in the precise terms dictated by the Westerns.  My own he has brought back again to me, and reports that it did not give satisfaction to the more precise authorities there.  He also asks that a commission of men of repute may be promptly sent, that they may have a reasonable pretext for visiting me.  My sympathisers in Sebasteia have stripped the covering from the secret sore of the unorthodoxy of Eustathius, and demand my ecclesiastical care. i.e. that Basil, as primate, should either consecrate them an orthodox bishop, or, if this was impossible under Valens, should take them under his own immediate episcopal protection.