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Epistulae ad Familiares, IV. xi.-xii.

ing to me is the fact that amid the depressing paucity of such friends, relations, or connexions as would sincerely support my restoration, I have discovered that you in particular have desired my return and have given me an extraordinary proof of your friendly feeling.

2 The other inducements to return were such as you specified; but the times being what they are, I could readily resign myself to going without them. This last transaction, however, is such as to leave me convinced that without the sympathy of such men and such friends as yourself, nobody, whether in adversity or in prosperity, can find life worth living. On this, therefore, I congratulate myself. But to dispel any doubt on your part that the man upon whom you have conferred this favour is your most sincere friend, of that I mean to give you some practical proof.

XII

Servius Sulpicius[1] to M. T. Cicero

Athens, May 31, 45 B.C.

1 Though I am aware that the news I am about to I tell you is not of the pleasantest, still, seeing that our lives are under the despotic sway of chance no less than of nature, I decided that it was my duty to inform you all of what has occurred, however painful the circumstances. On the 23rd May, having arrived on board ship at the Piraeus from the district of Epidaurus,[2] I there met Marcellus, my former colleague,[3] and I spent the whole day there to have the pleasure

  1. ↑ See iv. 1. 1, note.
  2. ↑ On the east coast of Argolis, where Sulpicius had probably been on the circuit as Governor of Greece.
  3. ↑ As consul in 51 B.C.; or it may mean "our colleague as augur."
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