Page:Loeb Classical Library L205N (1958).djvu/341

even contemplating anything of the kind. There still remained a certain style of correspondence appropriate to these times of ours in its gloom and melancholy; but I cannot fall back even upon that. For even that should surely convey either the promise of some substantial help or some consolation for your grief. I have no promise to make; for humiliated as I am by a misfortune like your own, it is only by extraneous assistance that I bear the weight of my afflictions, and my heart is more often inclined to deplore the conditions, than to rejoice in the fact, of my being alive.

² Although I have not myself personally been the victim of any particularly glaring act of injustice, and though it has never occurred to me even under present conditions to desire anything which Caesar has not spontaneously bestowed upon me, still none the less, so crushing are my anxieties, that I do not think I am acting aright even in remaining alive at all. For I have lost not only numbers of my most intimate friends, either torn away from me by death, or dragged from my side by banishment, but also all those friends whose affection I had won by the part I once played, in conjunction with yourself,^[1] in the successful defence of the Republic; and all around me I see the shipwrecks of their fortunes and the pillaging of their possessions; and not only do I hear of it, which would in itself be a misery to me, but I actually see, and it is the most distressing sight in the world, the squandering of the property of those men with whose assistance we once extinguished that awful conflagration; and in the very city in which but lately I was richly blessed in popularity, influence, and fame, of all that there is now nothing left me.