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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,^[1]—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