Letters to his Friends/Book 5

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¹ If you are in good health, it is well. I had imagined, considering our mutual regard and the renewal of our friendship, that I should have escaped being ridiculed and insulted in my absence, and that my brother would not have had his civil rights and his property attacked through you, all for a mere phrase.^[2] If his own propriety of conduct^[3] was not enough to protect him, either the prestige of our family or my own earnest devotion to you all and the Republic ought to have been enough to help him in his need. As it is, I see him caught in the toils, and myself abandoned, and that by those in whom such conduct might have been least expected.

² And so I am in mourning, and wear the garb of ​mourning,^[4] I, who govern a province, I, who command an army, I, who am conducting a war! And seeing that your procedure in these matters has been marked neither by reasonableness nor the clemency of our ancestors,^[5] nobody need be surprised if you all live to regret it. I did not expect to find you so fickle-hearted in your dealings with me and mine. Meanwhile, speaking for myself, no family sorrow, no act of injustice on the part of any man, shall seduce me from my duty to the state.

¹ If you and the army are in good health, it is well. You write to me that "you had imagined, considering our mutual regard and the renewal of our friendship, that you would never have been ridiculed and insulted by me." What you exactly mean by that, I cannot quite understand; I suspect, however, you have been informed that, when maintaining that there were quite a number of men who resented my having preserved the state, I asserted in the Senate that your relations, whose request you could not have refused, had prevailed upon you to suppress the compliments you had already decided it was incumbent upon you to pay me in the Senate. In saying this, however, I was careful to add, that the duty of maintaining the safety of the state had been so apportioned between us, that while I defended the City from treachery at home and intestine outrage, you guarded Italy ​from armed enemies and secret conspiracy; and that this association of ours in so great and glorious a responsibility had been undermined by your relations, who, though I had complimented you by giving you the most handsome and honourable commissions, had shown themselves afraid of your paying me any share of the goodwill you should have reciprocated.

² When at this point I was explaining how eagerly I had looked forward to your speech, and how completely misled I had been, my speech appeared to cause some little amusement, and was followed by a sort of ripple of laughter, not at you, but rather at the mistake I had made, and at my so openly and frankly admitting I had pined for your praise. Well now, what I said cannot be regarded as anything but a compliment to you—that amid all the glory and grandeur of my achievements I had still desired to have some specific confirmation of them from your lips.

³ When, however, you use the words "considering our mutual regard," what meaning you attach to what is "mutual" in friendship, I do not know; what I conceive it to be is "the acceptance and return of good feeling on equal terms." As to my own action, supposing that I were to say that it was for your sake that I allowed my chance of a province to pass by,^[6] you would think me somewhat of a hypocrite myself;^[7] for my interests pointed in the direction I took, and I get more and more enjoyment and satisfaction out of that decision of mine every day of my life. What I do say is, that from the moment I waived my claim to the province at a public meeting, I immediately began to consider how I could best hand it over to you. About you and ​your fellow-praetors drawing lots, I say nothing; I only wish to give you a hint that nothing was done in that matter by my colleague without my cognizance.^[8] Just recall everything else that happened—how promptly I convened the Senate on that day after the balloting was over, at what length I spoke about you; indeed, you yourself told me at the time that my speech was not only complimentary to yourself, but went so far as to reflect unpleasantly upon your colleagues.

⁴ And now we come to that decree of the Senate passed on the same day,^[9] the preamble of which is such, that so long as that decree is extant, there can be no possible doubt as to my kindness to you. Again, after you had left Rome, I should like you to call to mind how I spoke of you in the Senate, what I said at public meetings, and what was the letter I sent you. When you have made a list of all these acts of mine, I should be glad if you would judge for yourself, whether, when lately you came to Rome,^[10] your arrival on the scene strikes you as an adequate response, in a reciprocal sense, to all those services of mine.

⁵ You refer in your letter to "the renewal of our friendship"; well, I do not understand why you apply the term "renewal" to what has never been impaired.

⁶ As for your remark that "your brother Metellus ought not to have been attacked by me on account of 'a mere phrase,'" in the first place I should like you to believe that I warmly approve that feeling of yours, that brotherly affection so full of human kindness and affection; in the second place, if in any respect I have opposed your brother for the sake of the ​state, I beg you to forgive me; for I am as great a friend of the state as the greatest friend she has. If, however, I have but defended my personal safety against his most merciless attack upon me, you must rest content that I make no complaint to you either of your brother's injustice to me.

Now when I had discovered that he was directing every effort he could make as tribune^[11] to my destruction, and laying his plans accordingly, I appealed to your wife, Claudia,^[12] and to your sister Mucia^[13] too, of whose desire to serve me, in consideration of my intimacy with Pompey, I had assured myself on several occasions, to deter him from so injurious a policy.

⁷ And yet, as I know for certain that you were told, on the last day of December he inflicted upon me, consul and saviour of the Republic as I was, an indignity such as has never yet been inflicted upon any man holding the lowest office in the state, were he the most disloyal of citizens—he robbed me, on laying down my office, of the privilege of addressing the people; but that indignity after all resulted in my being most highly honoured. For though he permitted me to do no more than merely take the oath, I took that oath, and a very true and glorious oath it was, in a loud voice; and the people also swore as loudly that that same oath I had sworn was true.^[14]

​⁸ Now though I had suffered so notable an insult, nevertheless, on that very day I sent some common friends of ours to Metellus to entreat him to abandon his intention; but his answer to them was that he had already committed himself. And he had, as a matter of fact, not long before publicly declared that a man who had punished others without a trial ought not himself to be granted the privilege of making a speech.

What a sterling character! What a peerless patriot! For, in his judgment, the man who had delivered the Senate-house from massacre, the City from incendiarism, and Italy from war, deserved the same punishment as that inflicted by the Senate, with the unanimous approval of all honest men, upon those who had purposed to fire the City, butcher the magistrates and the Senate, and fan the flames of a devastating war. And so I defied your brother Metellus to his face. For on the 1st of January I so dealt with him in the Senate on the political situation, as to convince him that the man with whom he would have to fight lacked neither courage nor determination. On the 3rd of January, when he began to develop his proposal,^[15] every other word of his speech was a challenge or a threat to me, and he had no more deliberate purpose in mind, than by any means in his power, not by legal procedure or fair argument, but by brute force and browbeating, to effect the overthrow of myself. Had I not stood up to him, in his hot-headed attack upon me, with some courage and spirit, who in all the world would not suspect that the fortitude I showed in my consulship was due to accident rather than to policy?

⁹ If you were not aware that Metellus harboured ​such designs against me, it is but right that you should draw the inference that your brother has kept you in the dark about matters of the gravest moment; but if, on the other hand, he has let you to some extent into the secret of his policy, I deserve that you should regard me as a man of mild and indulgent disposition for not remonstrating with you in reference to these very matters.

And if you are satisfied that it was not the "mere phrase," as you describe it, of Metellus, but his whole policy and the extreme bitterness of his animosity towards myself that distressed me, I would have you now at last recognize my kindness—if indeed "kindness" is the word for slackness and indifference of mind under so exasperating an outrage. Never once did I express an opinion in the Senate unfavourable to your brother; whenever there was any proposal about him, I agreed, without rising, with those whose proposals seemed to me to be the least drastic. I will add this too, that though I need not have troubled myself in the matter after what had occurred, still, so far from resenting the measure, I did my very best to help its being carried—I mean that a release from his penalties^[16] should be granted by a decree of the Senate to my assailant, all because he was your brother.

¹⁰ This proves that I did not "attack" your brother, but merely repelled your brother's attacks; nor have I been "fickle-hearted" towards you (I quote your letter), but so constant at heart as to remain ever true to my kindly feeling for you, although I am no longer the recipient of your favours. And even at this very moment when you are, I might almost ​say, writing me a threatening letter, I write back and answer you thus—not only do I excuse your resentment, but I even pay it the tribute of my highest commendation; for my own feeling prevents my forgetting the power of brotherly love. I only beg you on your side, too, to prove an impartial judge of my own resentment; and if your friends have attacked me bitterly, ruthlessly, and without provocation, I ask you to come to the conclusion that not only ought I to have refused to surrender, but that in such a cause, I ought even to have availed myself of your assistance, and that of the army you command.^[17] It has been my desire that you should always be friendly disposed towards me, and I have striven to convince you that I, too, am most friendly disposed towards you. That kindly feeling I still maintain, and so long as it is your pleasure, I shall continue to maintain it; and I shall sooner cease to resent your brother's conduct because I love you, than because of that resentment permit our mutual goodwill to be in the slightest degree impaired.

¹ The insults of a very troublesome fellow,^[19] which he heaps upon me in one public meeting after another, have the sting taken out of them by your good services to me; and as, coming from such a man, they carry no weight, I despise them; and, by an interchange of personality, it is a pleasure to me ​to regard you in the light of a cousin^[20] to me. As for him, I don't want to give him a thought, though the fact remains that I have twice saved his life in spite of himself. ² As to my own affairs, not to bother you all with too many letters, I have written fully to Lollius, telling him what I want done about my provincial accounts, so that he may pass on my instructions and bring the matter to your notice. I hope you will always be as friendly to me as you have been in the past, if you possibly can.

¹ The letters of my brother Quintus and my intimate friend, T. Pomponius, ^[21] had so raised my hopes, that I counted upon no less assistance on your part than on that of your colleague.^[22] And so I lost no time in sending you a letter, in which, as the circumstances of the time demanded, I both expressed my thanks to you and asked for your subsequent assistance. Afterwards, I was given to understand not so much from what my friends wrote to me, as by the remarks of those who travelled by this route, that your feelings had changed; and the result was that I did not like to pester you with correspondence.

² Now, however, my brother Quintus has sent me a full report of the very gracious speech which you delivered in the Senate; and that speech moved me to make an effort to write to you; and I beg and ​pray of you, as earnestly as I may without straining your courtesy, to save your kinsfolk by saving me also, rather than be induced to attack me on account of the arrogance and ruthlessness of your kinsfolk.^[23] You have won a victory over yourself so far as to lay aside certain private enmities^[24] of your own in the interests of the state; will you ever be prompted to countenance the enmities of others to the prejudice of the state?

But if, with your usual clemency, you now give me your help, I assure you that I shall be in all respects wholly at your service; if, however, owing to that system of violence which has triumphed over me and the state together, the magistracy, the Senate, and the people are alike forbidden to come to my aid, then, I say, beware lest, if at any time you should desire to recall this opportunity of saving us all, you may not be able to do so, because there will be nobody left to save.

¹ I had certainly resolved to send you no letters except letters of introduction—not that I gathered that even these had as much weight with you as I should like, but so as not to give those who asked me for them reason to suspect any loosening of the ties which bind us. Now that Pomponius, however, a man who knows better than anybody all the energy ​I have shown, all the services I have performed, on your behalf, who is eager for your friendship, and very much attached to myself, is leaving Rome to join you, I felt that I had to write something, especially as I could in no other way satisfy Pomponius himself.

² Were I to look for the highest services at your 2 hands, nobody ought to regard it with surprise. For there is nothing which might conduce to your welfare, your honour, or your position, that has not found its way from me to you.^[26] That in return for all this you have shown me no practical gratitude whatever, you are yourself the best of witnesses; indeed, I have been told by many that you are to be credited with something quite the opposite—I shrink from saying "I have discovered it,"^[27] lest I happen to use in my letter the very expression people say you so often untruthfully attribute to me. But I had rather you should learn what has been reported to me from Pomponius, who is as much annoyed at it as I am, than from my letter. How exceptionally loyal at heart I have been to you, both the Senate and the people of Rome can testify; how much gratitude you have shown me, you can estimate for yourself, how much you owe me, it is for the rest of the world to estimate.

³ In all I have hitherto done for your sake, I was prompted by goodwill and subsequently by a regard for consistency. But what remains to be done, believe me, demands far greater enthusiasm on my part, and a far more serious effort. And unless it appears that my efforts are thrown away and wasted, I mean to persevere in them to the utmost limit of my strength; if, however, I perceive that they evoke ​no gratitude, I shall not make the mistake of letting myself be suspected of lunacy, yes, even by you yourself.^[28] What is impending, and what it all means, you can ascertain from Pomponius. And as regards Pomponius himself, I commend him to you so warmly, that although I am sure you will do all in your power for the sake of the man himself, I none the less beg of you, if there still lurks in your heart any affection for me, to show it unreservedly in dealing with Pomponius's business. You can do nothing that would give me greater pleasure than that.

¹ Decius the copyist paid me a visit and entreated me to make every effort to prevent the appointment for the present of anybody to succeed you; now although he impressed me as being an honest fellow and on friendly terms with you, still, having a clear recollection of the purport of your previous letter to me, I did not feel quite convinced that a man of your shrewdness had so completely changed his mind. But after your wife Cornelia had called upon Terentia, and I had had a conversation with Q. Cornelius,^[30] I was particularly careful to attend every single meeting of the Senate, and what gave me most trouble was to compel Q. Fufius,^[31] tribune ​of the plebs, and all the others to whom you had written, to believe me rather than your letters. Anyhow the whole business has been postponed till the month of January, but we find no difficulty in holding our own.

² Roused by your congratulations—for you wrote to me some time ago, wishing me luck on having bought a house from Crassus—I have now bought that very house for three thousand five hundred sestertia,^[32] a considerable time after you congratulated me on having done so. The consequence is that I must tell you I am so heavily in debt, that I am eager to join a conspiracy, if anybody would let me in; but while some exclude me because they hate me, and indeed make no secret of their hatred of the man who crushed the other conspiracy,^[33] others distrust me and fear that I am trying to circumvent them, and do not believe that one who has released the money-lenders from a blockade can possibly be short of money. As a matter of fact there is plenty of money to be got at six per cent. Speaking for myself, my achievements have secured me one advantage—I am looked upon as "a good name.^[34]"

³ I have inspected your own house, too, and its whole design, and it has pleased me very much.

⁴ As for Antonius,^[35] though everybody remarks the cessation of his services to me, it did not prevent my defending him in the Senate with much earnestness and assiduity, and I greatly impressed the Senate with my address and the weight of my personality.

⁵ I should be glad if you would write to me more frequently.

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¹ If you and the army are in good health, it is well; I, too, am in good health.^[36] Your official dispatch gave me, in common with everybody else, more pleasure than you could believe. For you indicate in it as confident a hope of peace as I have consistently held out to all others, because I relied exclusively upon you; though I must tell you that your enemies of long standing (your friends of recent date) are profoundly dismayed at your dispatch; they have been hurled down from the height of their expectations, and lie prostrate.

² As regards your private letter to me, however, in spite of its containing but a slight expression of your regard for me, I assure you I was charmed with it; for generally speaking nothing cheers me up so much as the consciousness of my good services to others; and if, as sometimes happens, they elicit no adequate response, I am quite content that the balance of services rendered should rest with me. Of this I have no doubt at all that, if the proofs of my deep devotion to you have not quite succeeded in attaching me to you, that attachment will be brought about and cemented between us by the interests of the state.

³ Still, not to leave you in any doubt as to what it was I missed in your letter, I shall be as frank with you in mine as my own nature and our mutual friendship alike demand. My achievements have been such that I did expect some congratulatory reference ​to them in your letter, in consideration, not only of our intimacy, but of their importance to the state; and I can only suppose that you omitted any such reference because you were afraid of wounding anybody's feelings. Anyhow you must allow me to say that what I accomplished for the salvation of our country is now approved by the deliberate pronouncement of the whole world; and when you return home, you will recognize that the wisdom as well as the courage I showed in my achievements was such, that you, though a much greater man than Africanus^[37] ever was, will find no difficulty in admitting me, who am not much less a man than Laelius, into close association with yourself both in public policy and in private friendship.

¹ What enthusiasm I showed on the. . .^[38] in defending, or I might even say in exalting your official position, I have no doubt all your correspondents have told you. My speech was neither lukewarm nor ambiguous, nor such as could be passed over in silence. For I fought my battle^[39] against the consuls, and many of the consulars too, with an eagerness I have never shown in any cause before, and I took upon myself the perpetual championship of your dis- ​tinctions, and discharged in full measure the service due to our long-standing intimacy—a service, indeed, long overdue because it has been interrupted by the many vicissitudes of the times.^[40]

² And it was not, I solemnly asseverate, that I ever lacked the will to show you either respect or honour, but certain pestilent fellows, resenting the praise bestowed upon another, have once or twice estranged you from me, and now and then caused me to change my opinion of you. But an opportunity occurred, for which I had prayed rather than hoped, of enabling me in the zenith of your prosperity to give convincing proof that I was neither forgetful of our mutual goodwill nor disloyal to our friendship. For I have succeeded in making not only your whole family, but every citizen without exception, acknowledge the sincerity of my friendship for you; with the result that that paragon of women, your wife, as well as those admirably affectionate, gallant, and popular men, your sons, rely implicitly upon my counsel and advice, my zeal and my public policy; while both the Senate and the people of Rome understand that during your absence you have nothing so quickly available, or so ready to your hand, as the labour, attention, assiduity, and influence you can claim in all that touches your interests from myself.

³ I believe the letters of your household are giving you a clear account of what has been, and what is being, done here. As to myself, I am extremely anxious that you should make up your mind and convince yourself of the fact that it was not through any sudden caprice or by accident that I tumbled into the business of protecting your high position, but that from the moment I first set foot in the forum, ​I have ever kept in view the possibility of my enjoying the closest association with you. Indeed, I well remember that from that day you have never found me fail in my respect for you, nor I you in your consummate kindness and generosity to me. If there have occurred any ruptures between us, due not so much to acts as to suspicion on either side, false and fanciful as they have proved to be, let them be eradicated for ever from our hearts and lives. For such is your character, and such I desire my own to be, that faced as we are by the same political conditions, I feel sure that our union and friendship will redound to the credit of each of us.

⁴ And for that reason you, on your part, will decide for yourself what tribute of esteem should in your judgement be paid me—and I trust you will make that decision with proper regard to my deserts—while I on my part explicitly promise you my active support in a special and unprecedented degree, whatever the nature of the service required, provided the object of it is your honour and renown. And in so doing, though I shall find a large field of competitors, I am sure I shall easily surpass them all in the judgment of the world in general, and particularly of your two sons. I am singularly attached to them both, but while I am equally well-disposed to Marcus, I am the more devoted to Publius, because, though indeed he has always done so from his boyhood, still just now he treats me with greater deference and affection than ever, just as though I were a second father.

⁵ I should be glad if you would regard this document as intended to have the force of a compact, and not of a mere letter, and believe that I shall most solemnly observe, and most conscientiously perform, ​all I promise you, and pledge myself to do. I undertook the defence of your high position in your absence, and in that defence I mean to persevere, no longer for the sake of our friendship alone, but now also for the sake of my consistency.

I therefore thought it enough for the present to write to you just this—that, if I saw myself that there was anything to be done in furtherance of your wishes or interests or advancement, I should do it on my own initiative; but if I received any hint from yourself or your friends, I should not fail to convince you that neither have you ever written, nor any of your friends suggested, anything to me that went unheeded. I should like you, therefore, to write to me on all subjects, great, small, or indifferent, as to a most intimate friend; and, moreover, to instruct your people so to avail themselves of my industry, counsel, authority, and influence in all business affairs, public or private, forensic or domestic, affecting yourself or your friends, your visitors or clients, that, so far as is possible, in such labour my yearning for your presence may find alleviation.

¹ If you are in good health, it is well; I am in good I health. If you keep up your practice of appearing for the defence of clients, you have a client at hand ​in P. Vatinius, who desires the formal pleading of a case on his behalf. You will not, I take it, refuse the defence of a man when in office, whose defence you undertook when he was in danger. Besides, from my point of view, whom should I rather select and call to my aid than the man whose defence taught me the secret of success? And surely I need not fear that the man who turned his back upon a coalition of the most powerful men in Rome to fight for my political status will not overpower and crush the slanderous jealousies of a pack of contemptible marplots. So if you love me as much as ever, take up my case without reserve, and consider that you should accept and shoulder whatever burden of service it may be that the defence of my prestige involves. You know that my good fortune in some strange way finds plenty of detractors, though I swear I don't deserve it; but what does that matter, if, do what I will, it is somehow my fate to find it so? Should it happen then, by any chance, that there is anybody who wants to prejudice my claims,^[43] I beg of you not to abate your customary generosity in defending me in my absence. I have transcribed you below my despatch to the Senate on my achievements; it is an exact copy of what I sent.

² They tell me that your slave^[44], your reader who ran away, has joined the Vardaei; you gave me no instructions about him, but I have, nevertheless, issued a provisionary warrant for his pursuit by land and sea, and I am sure I shall find him for you, unless he has escaped to Dalmatia; still I shall rout him out even from there sooner or later. Whatever you do, remain my friend. Farewell.

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¹ If you are in good health, it is well; I, too, am in good health. So far I have ferreted out nothing about your Dionysius^[45]; and I am the less likely to do so since the cold of Dalmatia which drove me thence has again frozen me up here. I shall not stop, however, until I rout him out some time or other. But you are setting me all sorts of hard tasks. You wrote me some rigmarole of an intercession, and a very earnest one it was, on behalf of Catilius.^[46] Then there's our friend Sextus Servilius,^[47]—a plague upon you both! for I swear I am as fond of him as you are. But are these the kind of clients, these the kind of cases you gentlemen undertake to defend? A man like Catilius, the most bloodthirsty ruffian alive, who has murdered, roughly handled, utterly ruined so many free-born folk, mothers of families, Roman citizens, and devastated whole districts? The ape—I wouldn't give a groat for the fellow^[48]—took up arms against me, so I made him a prisoner of war.

² But when all is said and done, my dear Cicero, what can I do? On my oath, I am anxious to carry out your commands to the letter, and I remit and cancel at your request the punishment—it was of a corporal nature—I had intended inflicting upon him if ever I got hold of him. But what answer can I give those who demand legal reparation for the pillage of their property, the capture of their ships, the murder of their brothers, children, and parents? ​I swear if I had the cheek of Appius,^[49] whose place I was elected to fill, even then I could not tackle such a job. What about it then? Whatever I know you want done I shall be careful to do. He is being defended by Q. Volusius,^[50] a pupil of yours, if haply that fact can rout his opponents; there lies his best hope.

³ As for myself, if there be any need for it where you are, you will defend me. Caesar is still treating me unjustly. He still refuses to bring before the Senate the question of the supplications^[51] due to me and of my Dalmatian exploits, as though forsooth what I achieved in Dalmatia did not most fully justify even a triumph. For if I have got to wait till I have brought the whole war to a close, well, Dalmatia has twenty towns to start with, and those they have annexed are over sixty. If I have no supplication decreed me unless I take them all by storm, my treatment is very different from that of any other commander in the world.

After the supplications had been decreed me, I I set out for Dalmatia; six towns I stormed by force and captured . . . . This single town,^[53] the largest of them all, I have now taken four times; for I took ​four towers and four walls, and their whole citadel as well, whence I was forcibly dislodged by snow, cold, and rain; and it is a shame, my dear Cicero, that I have been compelled to leave behind me a town I had taken, and a war I had practically brought to an end.^[54] And that is why I beg you, if the need arises, to plead my cause with Caesar,^[55] and to consider it incumbent upon you to defend me in every respect, bearing in mind the fact that you have no more sincere friend than myself. Farewell.

¹ I am not surprised at your gratitude to me for my services^[56]; for I have found you to be the most grateful of men, and I have never ceased to proclaim that fact. For not only have you felt grateful to me, but you have shown your gratitude in full and overflowing measure. And for that reason you will find that in all the rest of your affairs my activity on your behalf is unimpaired and my goodwill unaltered.

² You commend to me that most excellent lady, your wife Pompeia; well, as soon as I had read your letter I had a conversation with our friend Sura,^[57] and asked him to tell her from me to inform me, without hesitation or reserve, if there were anything she required, and that I would do all she wanted with the utmost energy and attention; and so I will, and ​if I think it necessary to do so I shall call upon the lady myself. But, for all that, I should like you to write to her yourself, and tell her not to think there is anything either so important, or so insignificant, as to seem to me either difficult, or beneath my dignity. Anything I may have to do in relation to your affairs I shall regard as a labour of love and an honour to myself. As to Dionysius, as you are my friend, wind up the business; whatever pledge you have given him, I shall redeem it. If, however, he proves himself a scoundrel (as he is), you will lead him captive in your triumph. Perdition seize the Dalmatians, who are worrying you! But, as you say, they will soon be taken, and so shed lustre on your exploits; for they have always been accounted a warlike race.

¹ Often, when I have attempted to discuss this topic with you face to face, I have been deterred by a sort of almost boorish bashfulness; but now that I am away from you I shall bring it all out with greater boldness; for a letter does not blush. I am fired by an extraordinary, but not—as I think—reprehensible eagerness to have my name rendered illustrious and renowned by no other pen than yours. And though ​you often assure me that such is your intention, you will still, I hope, pardon my being so impatient. The fact is, that the style of your works is such that, though I had always expected great things, you have surpassed my expectations, and have so fascinated me or fired my imagination as to make me desire that my achievements should be put on record at the earliest possible moment by none other than you yourself. And it is not only the prospect of celebrity in ages to come that impels me to grasp what I may call the hope of immortality, but also that desire I have mentioned to enjoy to the full while yet alive, whether it be the pronouncement of your weighty testimony, or the expression of your friendly feeling, or the charm of your genius.

² But even as I write these words I can quite appreciate the pressure upon you of the heavy burden of various works you have undertaken and, indeed, already begun. But seeing that you had now almost completed your History of the Italian and Civil Wars—and you had also told me that you were breaking the ground for other enterprises—I would not do myself the disservice of failing to suggest that you should ask yourself the question, whether you would prefer to weave my part in it into the general context of your History, or else, as many of the Greek annalists have done—Callisthenes in his Phocian War, Timaeus in his War of Pyrrhus, Polybius in his Numantine War, all of whom respectively detached the wars I have mentioned from the continuity of their histories—you, too, in like manner, would disconnect a civil conspiracy from wars waged by public enemies and aliens. I can quite see that it makes but little difference to my reputation, but ​it certainly does affect somewhat my impatience of any delay, that you should not wait until you come to the proper place for it, but promptly grapple with the whole of that particular episode, and the then political situation. At the same time, if all your mind is concentrated upon one subject and upon one personality, I see even now in my mind's eye, how much richer, and more artistic will be the result. And yet I am quite sensible of my presumption, first, in laying such a burden upon you (for your other engagements may well justify your refusing me), and then in demanding actually that you should eulogize my achievements. What if they seem to you to be not so very deserving of eulogy?

³ But anyhow, if a man has once transgressed the bounds of modesty, the best he can do is to be shameless out and out. So I frankly ask you again and again to eulogize my actions with even more warmth than perhaps you feel, and in that respect to disregard the canons of history; and—to remind you of that personal partiality, of which you have written most charmingly in a certain prefatory essay, clearly showing that you could have been as little swayed by it as Xenophon's famous Hercules by Pleasure,^[59]—if you find that such personal partiality enhances my merits even to exaggeration in your eyes, I ask you not to disdain it, and of your bounty to bestow on our love even a little more than may be allowed by truth. And if I can induce you to undertake what I suggest, you will, I assure myself, find a theme worthy even of your able and flowing pen.

⁴ From the beginning of the conspiracy to my return from exile it seems to me that a fair-sized volume could be compiled, in which you will be able to make ​use of your exceptional knowledge of civil changes, whether in disentangling the causes of the revolution or suggesting remedies for its calamities, while you reprehend what you consider blameworthy, and justify what you approve, setting forth your reasons in either case; and if you think you should treat the subject with exceptional freedom of speech, as has been your habit, you will stigmatize the disloyalty, intrigues, and treachery of which many have been guilty towards me. Moreover, what has happened to me will supply you with an infinite variety of material, abounding in a sort of pleasurable interest which could powerfully grip the attention of the reader—if you are the writer. For there is nothing more apt to delight the reader than the manifold changes of circumstance, and vicissitudes of fortune, which, however undesirable I found them to be in my own experience, will certainly afford entertainment in the reading; for the placid recollection of a past sorrow is not without its charm.

⁵ The rest of the world, however, who have passed through no sorrow of their own, but are the untroubled spectators of the disasters of others, find a pleasure even in their pity. Take, for instance, the way the great Epaminondas^[60] died at Mantinea; who of us but recalls it with delight, mingled with a certain compassion? Then only does he bid them pluck out the javelin, when in answer to his question he is told that his shield is safe; and so, despite the agony of his wound, with a mind at ease he died a glorious death. Who does not feel his sympathy excited and sustained in reading of the exile and return of Themistocles?^[61] The fact is that the ​regular chronological record of events in itself interests us as little as if it were a catalogue of historical occurrences; but the uncertain and varied fortunes of a statesman who frequently rises to prominence give scope for surprise, suspense, delight, annoyance, hope, fear; should those fortunes, however, end in some striking consummation^[62] the result is a complete satisfaction of mind which is the most perfect pleasure a reader can enjoy.

⁶ It will, therefore, more closely coincide with my wishes if you prove to have adopted the plan of detaching from the main trend of your narrative, in which you embrace the uninterrupted history of events, this drama, if I may so call it, of my own particular actions and experiences; for it contains a variety of acts and a number of scenes in the way of political measures and situations. And I am not afraid of your thinking that I am laying a trap for your favour by a paltry piece of flattery, when I declare to you outright that I had rather be complimented and extolled by you than by anybody else. For neither are you the kind of man to be blind to your own merits, and not to suspect those who fail to admire you of jealousy, rather than those who praise you of sycophancy; nor am I, on the other hand, so irrational as to desire the vindication of my claims to everlasting renown to be undertaken by a man who does not, in the very act of vindicating those claims, himself win that renown which is the due meed of genius.

⁷ When the great Alexander himself was anxious to have his portrait painted by Apelles and his statue made by Lysippus in preference to all others, it was not as a mark of favour to them, but because ​he thought that their art would reflect as much glory upon themselves as it would upon himself. Now those artists certainly made familiar to strangers the likenesses of the person; but even if there were no such likenesses in existence, illustrious men would be none the less renowned. The great Agesilaus^[63] of Sparta, who never submitted himself to either painter or sculptor, is no less a man to be talked about than those who have taken particular pains to be so represented; for a single monograph of Xenophon in praise of that king has had a far greater vogue than any painting or statue of them all. Again, it will more effectually conduce both to my happiness of mind and the dignity of my memory to have won a place in your history than in that of others, for this reason, that not only shall I have enjoyed the advantage of your literary talent, as Timoleon enjoyed that of Timaeus, and Themistocles that of Herodotus, but also the moral authority of a man highly distinguished and of established reputation, one, moreover, recognized and approved as a leader of men in the greatest and gravest issues of public life; so that it will appear that I have had vouchsafed me not only the celebrity which Alexander, when he visited Sigaeum, declared that Homer had bestowed upon Achilles, but also the weighty testimony of a great and distinguished man. I have a liking for Naevius's well-known Hector, who is not only delighted "to be praised" but all the more, he adds, "by one who has himself been praised."^[64]

⁸ But if I fail to induce you to grant me this request, by which I mean if anything prevents your doing so (for it is inconceivable to me that any specific request of mine should be refused by you), I shall ​perhaps be forced to do what some have frequently found fault with—write about myself; and yet I should be following the example of many distinguished men. But, as you are well aware, this kind of composition has a double drawback—the author is obliged to write about himself with a certain reserve, when there is anything to be praised, and to pass over what is deserving of censure. Besides which, it is less convincing, less impressive, and there are many in short who take exception to it, and say that the heralds at the public games show more modesty; for when they have crowned all the other victors and announced their names in a loud voice, and are then themselves presented with a crown before the dispersal of the games, they engage the services of some other herald, so as not to proclaim themselves victors with their own voices.

⁹ This is just what I desire to avoid, and if you accept my brief, I shall avoid it; and I entreat you to do so. You will perhaps wonder, when you have so repeatedly assured me of your intention to commit to writing with the utmost precision the policy and results of my consulship, why I am making this request of you so earnestly and at such length at this present moment; the reason is that burning desire I have, of which I spoke at the beginning of my letter, to hurry matters on (for I am of an eager disposition), so that not only the world may get to know me through your books while I am yet alive, but that I myself also may have in my own lifetime the full enjoyment of my little bit of glory.

¹⁰ If it is no inconvenience to you, I should like you to write back word what you intend to do about all this; for if you undertake the business, I shall put ​together some notes on all that occurred; but if you put me off till a later date, I shall talk it over with you in person. Meanwhile I am sure you will not be idle, and will complete the polishing of the works you have in hand, and remain my dear friend.

¹ Though the consolation your letter affords me is very acceptable to me in itself—for the genuine friendliness it evinces is matched by the sound sense with which it is combined—still quite the greatest profit I derived from that letter was the inference I drew from it, that you had a magnificent contempt for the vicissitudes of human affairs and were admirably prepared and equipped to bear the blows of fortune; and indeed, in my judgment, the highest achievement of philosophy is this—to be independent of the outside world, and not to make your interpretation of life, as happy or unhappy, dependent upon external circumstances.

² Now though this belief had not wholly fallen away from me (for it had taken deep root), yet it had been seriously shaken and shattered by the violence of tempests and the concentrated assault of misfortunes; but now I see that you are coming to its rescue, and feel that you have actually done so by your last letter, and with much success; and so I think I should tell you repeatedly, and not only ​hint, but make it quite plain to you, that nothing could have given me greater pleasure than your letter.

³ But while the arguments you have assembled with such good taste and wealth of erudition are cogent aids to consolation, nothing is so cogent as my clear realization of the firmness and imperturbabillty of your spirit, and not to imitate it would, I feel, be most discreditable to me. I therefore claim to have more courage than even you yourself, who are my instructor in courage, in so far as you seem to me to have a definite hope that the present situation will some day improve. For obviously your "gladiators' risks and hazards"^[65] and those "analogous instances" of yours, besides the arguments strung together in your dissertation, were calculated to forbid my utterly despairing of the Republic. It is not, therefore, from one point of view, so surprising that you should have more courage than I, seeing that you have some hope to go upon, but from another, it is indeed surprising that you should entertain any hope at all. For what is there that has not been so grievously damaged, but that you might as well admit that it has been destroyed and annihilated? Look around at all the limbs of the state which are best known to you; not one will you find, I am sure, that has not been broken or incapacitated; and I should pursue the subject, if I either saw things more clearly than I know you do, or could talk about them without sorrow; and yet, according to your admonitions and instructions, all sorrow must be thrown to the winds.

⁴ My domestic troubles therefore I shall bear as you think it right I should, and the public troubles with ​a little more courage perhaps than even yourself, who are my instructor. For you (so you write) have some degree of hope to comfort you, whereas I shall maintain my courage even amid utter despair, as, in spite of that despair, you yourself are at once exhorting and instructing me to do. For you cheer me with reminders of what I cannot but feel that I have done, and of what I achieved, with you in the first rank of my supporters. Yes, I did for my country certainly no less than I was bound to do—assuredly more than has ever been demanded of the heart or head of any human being.

⁵ You will, I hope, forgive me if I am somewhat self-laudatory; it was your intention, I know, to raise me from my depression by making me think about certain things; well, it soothes me to talk about them too. And so, as you advise, I mean to withdraw myself as much as possible from all that troubles and distresses me, and to turn my thoughts to the things which add a lustre to prosperity, while they help one to bear adversity. So far as our age and health on either side permit, I shall be your companion, and if we cannot be as much together as we could wish, we shall still so enjoy our affinity of mind, and identity of tastes, as to seem to be always together.

¹ If you are in good health, all is well. I enjoy my I usual health, and yet indeed it is not quite as good as usual. I have often missed you, as I wanted to ​see you. I was surprised at your never having been in Rome after I had left, and I am still surprised at it. I am not sure what it is in particular that keeps drawing you away from Rome. If solitude is what attracts you, because you are writing or busy with some work of the kind you are generally engaged upon, I am glad, and find no fault with your arrangement; for nothing can be more refreshing than such solitude, not only in these cheerless and lugubrious times, but even in times of tranquillity, the times we pray for, especially to a mind like yours, whether we regard it as being tired out and therefore now in need of repose after its arduous engagements, or as a mine of erudition and therefore always producing something out of its store to give pleasure to others and reflect glory upon yourself.

² If, however, as you suggest, you have abandoned yourself to tears and dejection, I grieve, of course, because you grieve and are so distressed; but if you allow me to say quite frankly what I feel, I cannot but blame you. Come now! Shall you be the only man not to see what is obvious—you who with your keen wits penetrate the deepest secrets? You, the only man not to perceive that your daily lamentations are doing you no good; you, not to perceive that the anxieties your common-sense calls upon you to minimize are thus being doubled?

³ Well, if I can do no good by trying to persuade you, I entreat you as a personal favour and specially request you, if there is anything you wish to do for my sake, to burst the bonds of those worries of yours and come back to live with us; in other words, to resume your normal habits of life, whether such as are common to all of us, or such as are peculiarly and ​exclusively your own. I am anxious not to pester you, if this friendly earnestness on my part is distasteful to you; but I am anxious to discourage your persistence in the course you have adopted. Now I am distracted by those two incompatible desires; and I should wish you either to take my advice, if possible, as regards the latter of them, or not to be offended with me as regards the former.^[66] Farewell.

¹ The full measure of your affection for me stands completely revealed in the letter I last received from you; not that I was unaware of it, but it is none the less agreeable and welcome to me—I should have said "delightful" had not that word dropped out of my vocabulary for all time, and not for that reason only which you surmise, and as to which, while employing the most gentle and loving terms, in substance you reprimand me severely, but because everything that should have helped to heal the bitter wound has ceased to exist.

² For what am I to do? Am I to take refuge with my friends? How many, tell me, are left of them? For they were for the most part yours as much as mine; but some of them have fallen, and others have somehow grown callous. I certainly might have lived with you, and nothing would have given me greater pleasure; old acquaintance, affection, ​intimacy, the same tastes—what bond is lacking, I ask you, to make our union complete? Can we not then be together? For the life of me I cannot see what is to prevent it. But as a matter of fact we have not been so, though we were neighbours in the country at Tusculum and Puteoli; I need not say in Rome, where the forum is a meeting-place for all, so that propinquity of residence is of no account.

³ But by some evil chance or other our age is confronted with conditions which, at the very moment when I ought to have been more than ever prosperous, make me actually ashamed of being alive. What possible sanctuary is left to me, despoiled as I am of all that might have graced and comforted both my private and public life? Literary work, I presume; and indeed it is that which I find an unfailing resource; for what else is there for me to do? But even literature itself seems somehow or other to shut me out of any haven of refuge, and to cast it in my teeth that I cleave to a life which promises nothing but the prolongation of a period of utter misery.

⁴ Such being the situation, can you wonder at my absenting myself from a city where I can find no pleasure in my home, and where I utterly loathe the life one leads, the men one meets, the bar and the senate-house? Accordingly I resort to literary work on which I spend all my time—not to get out of it a lasting cure, but some little forgetfulness of my sorrow.

⁵ But had you and I done what, owing to our daily apprehension, it never so much as occurred to us to do, we should have been together all the time, and I should have found your ill-health^[67] no more of an objection than you would my melancholy brooding. ​Let us carry out the suggestion, so far as it proves possible; for what could suit either of us better? I shall see you then at an early date.

¹ Although there is nobody in the world less fitted to offer you consolation, since your tribulations have caused me such sorrow that I am myself in need of consolation, still, seeing that my own sorrow was further removed from the bitterness of most intense grief than was yours, I decided that it was due to our close connexion and my friendly feeling for you that I should not remain so long silent while you are in such affliction, but should offer you some such measure of consolation as might mitigate, if it could not succeed in remedying, your sorrow.

² Now there is a form of consolation, extremely commonplace I grant you, which we ought always to have on our lips and in our hearts—to remember that we are human beings, born under a law which renders our life a target for all the slings and arrows of fortune, and that it is not for us to refuse to live under the conditions of our birth, nor to resent so impatiently the misfortunes we can by no process of forethought avoid, but, by recalling to mind what has befallen others, to induce the reflection that what has happened to ourselves is nothing new.

³ But neither these nor any other forms of consolation employed by the wisest of men and handed down ​in literature to posterity ought, it seems to me, to carry such conviction as the present plight of the state itself and this prolongation of the days of ruin—days when those are happiest who have reared no children, while those who have lost them in these times are less to be pitied than if they had done so when there was a sound, or indeed any. Republic.

⁴ But if what vexes you is your own private sense of loss, and your mourning is merely caused by the contemplation of what affects yourself, I doubt if your mind can easily be purged of so personal a sorrow altogether; whereas if your anguish is due (as is more consistent with your affectionate nature) to your bewailing the miserable fate of those who have fallen, well, in that case—not to mention what I have so frequently read and heard, that there is no evil in death, and if there be any sensation left after death, it should be rather regarded as deathlessness than death, while, if all sensation be lost, what is not felt cannot properly be deemed misery at all—this I can yet confidently affirm, that such is the chaos, the plotting, and the danger overhanging the state, that the man who has left it all behind him cannot possibly, in my opinion, have misjudged the situation.^[69] For what room is there now, I do not say for a sense of honour, for rectitude, for virtue, for honourable pursuits and liberal accomplishments, but even for any independence and security at all? I solemnly declare that I have not heard of the death of a single young man or boy in the course of this year of gloom and pestilence, but that he seemed to me to have been rescued by the immortal gods from all these miseries and most merciless conditions of life.

⁵ It follows then if you can rid yourself of this one ​idea that any evil, as you suppose, can have befallen those you loved, it means a very material abatement of your grief. For then there will only be left you that exclusive feeling of personal sorrow, in which they can have no share, but which begins and ends with yourself alone. But surely, in regard to that, it no longer becomes the moral dignity and wisdom you have exhibited from your boyhood, to be inordinately impatient of the troubles that have befallen yourself, when they have no connexion whatever with any misery or evil that may have befallen those to whom you were so devoted. The fact is that you have ever proved yourself, both in private and in public life, to be such that you are bound to maintain your high character, and obey the dictates of consistency. For whatever alleviation the lapse of time of itself is bound to bring us, obliterating in its course the most deep-seated of sorrows, that, I say, it is our duty by wisdom and foresight to forestall.

⁶ And again, if there never was a woman, when bereft of her children, so feeble in character as not, sooner or later, to make an end of her mourning, surely we men ought to anticipate by our wisdom what the passage of days is sure to bring us, and not to wait for time to apply the remedy which reason enables us to apply at this very moment.

If this letter of mine has done you any good, I feel that I have achieved something that I had at heart; but if by any chance it has not the desired effect, I still feel that I have played the part of a very sincere well-wisher and friend; and that is what I should like you to believe I have always been to you, and to rest assured that I shall continue to be.

​

¹ It, is not because I have forgotten our friendship or wilfully broken off my customary correspondence with you that I have sent you no letter for some years past. No; it is because the earlier part of that period was sunk in the common ruin of the state and myself, while during the later part of it I found a difficulty in writing to you on account of your own most unmerited and distressing troubles. Now, however, after a sufficiently long interval and a more searching consideration of your admirable character and high courage, I have thought it no deviation from the course I have set myself to send you these words.

² Well, my dear P. Sittius, how have I treated you? In those earliest days when you were being ill-naturedly attacked in your absence, and even had a criminal charge brought against you, it was I who defended you; and because, when your most intimate friend^[71] was under trial and in danger, a charge against yourself was involved in that against him, I spared no pains in safeguarding you and your cause; and quite recently, just after my return, although I found that proceedings had been begun in a way that would not at all have satisfied me had I been on the spot, still in no single respect did I fail to promote your welfare; and again, when, as ​matters then stood, the unpopularity roused by the price of corn, the hostility not only of your own, but also of your friends' enemies, the unfairness of the whole trial, and many other defects in the constitution, had proved stronger than the merits of the case and truth itself, I never failed to put my services, advice, efforts, influence, and testimony at the disposal of your son Publius.

³ And for that reason having scrupulously and religiously satisfied all the claims of friendship, I did not think it right to omit the further duty of exhorting and entreating you to remember, that, though a mortal, you are yet a man; in other words, to bear philosophically our common lot of fickle change and chance, which no single one of us can either avoid or vouch for, to defy sorrow and misfortune with a stout heart; and to reflect that in our state, as in all others that have risen to empire, the like calamities have befallen the bravest and best of men through the injustice of tribunals. Would it were not the truth when I write that the state from which you are cut off is one in which no man of discernment could find any reason for gratification.

⁴ Now as to your son, I am afraid that, if I say nothing about him in my letter, it will appear as though I had omitted to testify to his merits as much as he deserves; but if, on the other hand, I write down all I feel, I fear that I shall so cause a recrudescence of your regret and sorrow. But anyhow the most sensible thing you can do is to look upon his filial affection, his sterling character, and his assiduity as your own assets, ready to your hand wherever you happen to be; for what we make our own in imagination is not less ours than what we see with our eyes.

​⁵ And that is why you ought to find a store of comfort not only in your son's exceptionally high character and profound affection for you, but in me and all those others who estimate you, and always will estimate you not by your fortune but by your character; and most of all in your own conscience, when you reflect that you have not deserved anything that has happened to you, and when you think of this too, that what troubles men of wisdom is the consciousness of guilt, not the accidents of fortune, their own misconduct, not any injury done them by others. For my part, impressed as I am by the memory of our long-standing friendship, the high character of your son, and the respect he has shown me, I shall always be at my post to soothe and lighten your misfortunes; and should you on your part happen to write to me about anything, I shall be very careful to give you no reason to suppose that you have written in vain.

¹ Although I, who am anxious to console you, am myself in need of consolation (for it is long since I have resented anything more bitterly than your misfortune), still in all earnestness I exhort you, and not only that, but entreat and implore you in the name of our mutual affection, to summon all your courage and prove yourself a man, and consider under what conditions all men and in what times we in ​particular have been brought into the world. Fortune has robbed you of less than your worth has brought you, for you have gained what not many "new men" have gained, and only lost what very many of the highest rank have lost. In fine, the condition of the laws, the law-courts, and politics in general, with which it seems we are threatened, is such that the man who has quitted this Republic of ours with the lightest penalty would appear to have come off best.

² You indeed—seeing that you keep your fortune and your children, and have me and the rest closely bound to you by the ties of intimacy and goodwill, and also because you are likely to have every opportunity of living with me and all your friends, and finally because the judgment given against you is the only one out of many to be criticized, as it is thought to have been a concession, though carried by a single vote only, and that a doubtful one, to the undue ascendancy of a particular person^[73]—for all these reasons then you ought to bear that trouble of yours with as light a heart as possible. My own attitude of mind towards yourself and your children will ever be what you wish it to be, and what it ought to be.

¹ Though I have never doubted your deep attachment to me, yet I am more and more convinced of it every day, and I have a vivid recollection of what ​you plainly told me in a certain letter—that you would be more assiduous in showing your respect for me than you had been in the province (although in my opinion your courtesy when in office there left nothing to be desired) in proportion as you could be more free to use your own judgment. And so not only was I extremely pleased with your former letter, which showed me that you had looked forward to my arrival with the eagerness of a friend, and that, though things had not turned out as you had anticipated, you were greatly delighted with the policy I had adopted, but I have also derived no little pleasure from the expression, in this last letter of yours, of your judgment, as well as of your kindness; your judgment, because I understand that, as all good and gallant men ought to do, you deem nothing to be expedient but what is right and honourable; your kindness, because you promise that, whatever policy I shall have adopted, you will be at my side, and nothing can be at once more agreeable to me and in my opinion more honourable to yourself than that.

² My plans have been laid long ago, but I have written nothing to you about them before, not that it was necessary to keep you in ignorance of them, but because to share your plans with another at such a crisis seems to be almost tantamount to reminding him of his duty, or rather entreating him urgently to become your partner in something either dangerous or difficult. However, your goodwill, kindheartedness, and friendly feeling for me being what it is, I warmly welcome such an attitude of mind on your part, but only on these terms (you see I am not going to abandon my usual modesty in making requests)—if you do what you declare you ​will, I shall be very grateful; if you do not, I shall forgive you, and conclude that in the latter case you could not refuse to make that concession to your fears, which in the former, you could not refuse to make to me. For the matter is assuredly of the first importance. The right course is obvious; what is expedient is obscure, except indeed that if we are the men we ought to be, in other words, men worthy of our literary aspirations, we cannot doubt but that what is most right is also most profitable.

And for that reason, if you think it well to join me, please come at once. But if you so decide, and wish to join me anywhere, but cannot do so immediately, I shall see to it that you are kept informed of all that goes on. Whatever you make up your mind to do, I shall regard you as my friend, but as the best of friends, if it is to do what I desire.

¹ However I might have managed it, I should certainly have met you, had you been pleased to come to the place you had appointed; and therefore, though for the sake of convenience to yourself you were disinclined to trouble me I must beg you to believe that I should have attached more weight to your wishes, had you but sent me word of them, than to any convenience of mine.

In reply to what you wrote, I should indeed be able to write to you more conveniently on each ​separate point if M. Tullius,^[76] my secretary, were here, though as regards him, I have satisfied myself that in the matter of making up the accounts at all events (as to the other matters I cannot speak so positively) he never wittingly did anything incompatible with either your interests or your good name; and, in the next place, supposing the old law and ancient custom as to handing in the accounts were still in force, I assure you that I should never have thought of handing them in without having first, in view of our intimate official connexion, checked them and made them up with you.

² And so what I should have done near Rome, had the traditional procedure been still observed, that I did in the province, since it was necessary according to the Julian law to leave the accounts behind in the province, and to send in an exact duplicate of them to the Treasury; and I did so not so as to induce you to accept my own calculations as conclusive, but I gave you as free a hand as I shall never regret having given you. I put my secretary entirely at your service (though I see that you now suspect him), and it was you who put your cousin, M. Mindius,^[77] in touch with him. The accounts were made up in my absence when you were present, and I never interfered with them at all except that I perused them; and my having received an account-book from my slave and secretary was the same thing as my having received it from your cousin. If this was a compliment, I could have paid you no greater; if a mark of confidence, I showed you almost more than I showed myself; had it been my duty to take precautions to prevent any return being made that would prejudice either your honour or your interests, ​I had nobody to whom I could have entrusted that business in preference to the man to whom I did entrust it. At all events I only acted in accordance with the law directing that we should deposit the accounts made up and balanced in two states, Laodicea and Apamea, which appeared to me, since this had to be done in the two chief states, to be the most important ones; and so, to take this particular objection first, my reply to it is, that, though I was in a hurry for just and proper reasons to hand in the account to the Treasury, I should still have waited for you, were it not that I looked upon the accounts left behind in the province as accounts already rendered to the Treasury, And that is why . . .^[78]

³ What you write about Volusius^[79] has nothing to do with the accounts. I am advised by skilled lawyers, and among them C. Camillus, the most skilled of them all, and, moreover, a very good friend of mine, that the debt could not have been transferred from Valerius to Volusius, but that the sureties of Valerius were liable (by the bye, it was not 3000 sestertia as you say, but 1900) For the money was put in our charge in the name of Valerius as the actual purchaser^[80]; and the adverse balance I have duly entered in the accounts.^[81]

⁴ But by taking the view you do^[82] you are robbing me of the fruits of my generosity, of my assiduity, and (though this troubles me least of all) of any ​credit for the modicum of intelligence I possess—I say of my generosity, in that you prefer to attribute the deliverance of my legate and my prefect [Q. Lepta] from a very grave disaster (and that, too, although they should not have been made liable at all) to the good services of my secretary rather than to mine—of my assiduity, in that you believe that I had neither any knowledge of my duty, nor had given any thought to it, important as it was, or even to my personal danger, serious as it was; that it was my secretary who inserted whatever he pleased in the accounts without having so much as read it over to me—of my intelligence, in that you imagine I had never even thought about a matter which I had actually thought out with no little penetration; for not only was it my own idea to set Volusius free, but it was also I who invented the scheme for saving Valerius's sureties and T. Marius himself from being so heavily mulcted—a scheme not only universally approved, but universally applauded; indeed, if you want to know the truth, my secretary was the only man, so far as I gathered, who was not particularly pleased about it.

⁵ But I thought it a point of honour, as long as the people kept what belonged to it, to look after the interests of so many—well, you may call them either friends or fellow-citizens.

Now as to Lucceius, it was arranged at the instance of Pompey, that that money should be lodged in a temple;^[83] that, as I have acknowledged, was done by ​my orders; and that money Pompey has used, as Sestius used that which you had deposited. But that, I take it, does not affect you at all. I should, indeed, have been angry with myself for never having thought of adding an entry, to the effect that it was by my orders that you had deposited the money in the Temple, had it not been certified by the most solemn and incontrovertible records to whom that money was assigned, by what decree of the Senate, and by what written instructions on your part or on mine it was handed over to P. Sestius. For when I saw that the whole transaction had been so distinctly and minutely recorded^[84] as to admit of no misunderstanding, I did not add an entry in which you were not concerned. And yet I should prefer to have added it, now that I see you regret its omission.

⁶ It is just as you write, "that you were bound to make that entry"; I am of the same opinion myself; and in that there will be no discrepancy between your accounts and mine. You will, I am sure, add the words "by my orders"—words which I certainly did not add myself; and there is no reason why I should deny the omission, nor should I do so, even if there were a reason, and you objected to my denial.

Again, as to the nine hundred sestertia, the entry was made exactly as you, or else your cousin, wished it to be made. But (since it seemed you were not altogether pleased in the case of Lucceius), if there is any correction I can make even at this late hour in handing in the accounts—well, as regards that, I have to consider, seeing that I did not avail myself of the decree of the Senate,^[85] what latitude is allowed me by the laws. At any rate, in the matter of the money collected, it was no business of yours ​to make your own entries tally with the accounts I had already handed in—unless I am mistaken; for there are others who know more about it than I do. But mind that you never doubt my doing everything I possibly can do that I consider to be to your interest, or even in accordance with your wishes.

⁷ As to what you write about the special service rewards,^[86] let me tell you that I have sent in the names of my military tribunes, and prefects, and staff—of my own staff at least. And there, indeed, I made a miscalculation; I was under the impression that the time allowed for sending in the names was unlimited; I was afterwards informed that it was necessary to send them in within thirty days of sending in my accounts. I was genuinely grieved that those rewards were not left for you to recommend in furtherance of your political aspirations, rather than for me, who had no such aspirations. Anyhow, as regards the centurions and staffs of the military tribunes no action has yet been taken; for that class of special service rewards had no time or limit attached to it by law.

⁸ There remains the matter of the hundred sestertia,^[87] about which I remember having had a letter brought me from you when you were at Myrina,^[88] admitting the error to be not mine but yours; though your cousin and Tullius appeared to be responsible for the mistake, if there was one. But since it could not be rectified, because I had already deposited my accounts and quitted the province, I believe that, in accordance with my friendly inclinations and my financial prospects at the time, I replied to you in terms of the warmest sympathy. But I neither think that the sympathy I then expressed in my letter amounted to a pecuniary obligation, nor ​do I now regard the letter I received from you to-day about the hundred sestertia as quite the same as the dunning letters received by others in these hard times.

⁹ At the same time you ought to bear this in mind, that all that money, which came to me in a perfectly legal way, I deposited in the hands of the publicani at Ephesus; that it amounted to 2200 sestertia,^[89] and that the whole sum was carried off by Pompey. Now whether I resign myself to that loss, or whether I resent it, you should certainly resign yourself to the loss of the hundred sestertia and estimate that just so much less has come to you, whether from your maintenance allowance or from my liberality; but even if you had put me down as your debtor for that hundred sestertia, still you are such a charming fellow and so devoted to me, that you would hesitate to proceed against me by way of estate-valuation^[90] at such a time as this; for anxious as I might be to have the money paid you in cash, I haven't got it. But put that down as a jest on my part, and I am sure you were jesting too. Anyhow, when Tullius returns from the country, I shall send him to you, if you think it has any bearing on the matter. There is no reason why I should wish this letter to be torn up.^[91]

¹ Your letter gave me pleasure, as I understood from it what I thought even without a letter, that you ​were very eagerly desirous of seeing me; and while I gladly accept the compliment, I do not yield place to you in that desire. For may all my prayers be answered as surely as it is true that I should like very much to be with you. As a matter of fact, when I had a greater choice of good men and citizens and true friends of mine, there was nobody even then whose company I preferred to yours, and few whose company I so greatly enjoyed; but in these days, when some of them have perished, others are away, and others are estranged, I pledge you my word that I should have greater pleasure in spending^[92] a single day with you, than the whole of this time with the majority of those in whose company I am obliged to live. Do not for a moment suppose that even solitude (and yet I am not allowed to enjoy even that) has not a greater charm for me than the conversation of those who frequent my house, with one, or at the most two, exceptions.

² And so I find a refuge—and I would have you find the same—in my attempts at literature, and also the consciousness of what I have sought to accomplish. For such is my nature, as you at any rate can very easily believe, that I have never done anything for myself rather than for my fellow-citizens; and had not that man,^[93] whose friend you never were, because you were mine, been jealous of me, he would himself have prospered, and so would all good citizens. I am he who desired that no autocrat's violence should prevail over peace with honour; it was I, too, when I felt convinced that those very arms I had always dreaded were mightier than that union of good citizens which I again had brought about, it was I who preferred to accept ​peace on any terms that would ensure our security, rather than struggle with a stronger foe. But all this and much else we may shortly have the chance of discussing in each other's company.

³ And after all there is nothing that keeps me at Rome, but the expectation of news from Africa.^[94] For it seems to me that matters there have matured till a decision is imminent. I think, however, it is of some importance to me (though I am not quite clear as to where precisely the importance lies), in any case, whatever the news from Africa may be, not to be far away from friends to advise me. For the position we have now reached is just this, that although there is a great difference in the claims of the combatants, yet I do not think there will be much difference in the results, whichever side is victorious.

But undoubtedly my courage, weakened as it was perhaps by the uncertainty of the issue, has been wonderfully fortified by the loss of all hope; and it was fortified too by your earlier letter, from which I learnt how bravely you are bearing the injustice done to you;^[95] and it cheered me to know that the very refinement of your character, as well as your erudition, was of benefit to you. For, to tell you the truth, I used to think that your feelings were unduly sensitive, as is the case with almost all of us who have lived a gentleman's life in a free and prosperous state.

⁴ But as we bore without undue elation those days of our prosperity, so it is our duty to bear with courage what is not only the untowardness but the total subversion of our fortunes at the present time; so that amid our crushing disasters we may at least gain this much good, that while even in our prosperity ​we ought to have thought lightly of death, on the grounds that it was not likely to retain any sensation, afflicted as we now are, we ought not merely to think lightly of it, but even to pray for it.

⁵ On your part, as you love me, make the best of that leisure of yours, and convince yourself that, apart from wrong and blameworthy conduct, of which you have always been and will be innocent, nothing can befall a man which is horrible or greatly to be feared; on my part, if I think it possible and proper, I shall come and see you soon; if anything happens to make a change of plan necessary, I shall inform you at once. Don't let your desire to see me stir you in your poor state of health from where you are, until you have inquired of me by letter what I wish you to do. I should be glad if you would maintain your regard for me, as indeed you do, and carefully study your health and peace of mind.