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of his company. On the following day, when I parted from him with the intention of going from the neighbourhood of Athens into Boeotia and clearing off the arrears of my judicial business, he was about to sail, he told me, round Cape Malea^[1] towards Italy.

² On the next day but one, when it was my intention to set out from near Athens, about the tenth hour of the night^[2] P. Postumius, an intimate friend of his, came to me and brought me the news that M. Marcellus, my former colleague,^[3] just after his dinner hour, had been stabbed with a dagger by P. Magius Cilo,^[4] an intimate friend of his, and that he had received two wounds, one in the gullet, the other in the head, just behind the ear, though my informant added that he hoped that he might recover; that Magius had subsequently committed suicide; that he himself had been despatched by Marcellus, to inform me of this, and to beg of me to summon some physicians. I summoned them, and immediately started for the place in the early dawn. I was not far from the Piraeus, when I was met by Acidinus's servant, bearing a note, in which he stated that Marcellus had passed away shortly before dawn. In this way was a man of the highest distinction done most cruelly to death by the vilest of men, and one who had been spared for his high deserts by his foes, found his murderer in a friend.

³ However, I hurried onwards to his tent; and there I found two freedmen, and perhaps a slave or two; they told me the others had fled in a panic of apprehension, because (as they argued) their master had been slain in front of his own tent.^[5] I was obliged to bring him back to the city in the same litter as had brought me there myself, using my own bearers;