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mourning,^[1] 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,^[2] 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