Gregory sometimes speaks of his personal anxieties and preoccupations in contexts where he reveals some details of his circumstances. In the letter he sent to Leander, bishop of Seville, sometime after 595, with a copy of the Moralia in Job which he had begun to compose while Leander was with him in Constantinople during the period after 579, he tells him of the difficulties he has been facing. He complains that it is far from easy to live spiritually as he would wish when he has so many responsibilities. He had felt it his duty to obey the then Pope's request that he should come out of the monastery he had founded and live in the world and work for the Church, first as Deacon, afterwards as an emissary of the Pope in Constantinople; and now as bishop of Rome himself; he talks of the loss of monastic quiet, of his experience of the tensions of public life for the Christian; he recollects how he first came to expound the book of Job to the little circle of Latin-speakers who were with him at Constantinople.