Page:Loeb Classical Library L205N (1958).djvu/541

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Epistulae ad Familiares, VI. xviii.

3 As regards your business, seeing that you are a guarantee for Pompey, if only your co-guarantee Galba,[1] a man more than a little careful in money matters, returns to Rome. I shall not cease to confer with him to find some way out of the difficulty; for I think he trusts me.

4 I am extremely glad that you are so favourably impressed with my Orator.[2] Indeed it is my own conviction that I have concentrated upon that book whatever critical ability I possessed on the subject of oratory. And if the book is really such as you say you think it is, then I too am of some consequence; if not, then I have no objection to my general reputation for critical ability being disparaged in exact proportion to the disparagement of that particular book. I am anxious that our dear Lepta, [3] young as he is, should find pleasure in such compositions; though his age is hardly ripe for it, still it can do him no harm to let his ears ring with language of that kind.

5 I am detained at Rome in any case by my dear Tullia's confinement. But even when she is strong again, as I hope she will be, I am still tied by the leg until I can screw the first instalment[4] out of Dolabella's agents and, to tell you the truth, I am not so keen on travelling as I used to be. I used to delight in my country houses, and their restfulness. My house here is as comfortable as any of my villas, and more restful than the most sequestered spot in the world. So my literary work does not suffer either; I am absorbed in it and there is. nothing to interrupt me, and that is why I think I am more likely to see you here than you are to see me at your place.

  1. ↑ Galba had been Caesar's lieutenant in Gaul, but afterwards joined the conspirators against him. He was great-grandfather of the emperor Galba.
  2. ↑ His treatise Ad Marcus Brutum Orator, written in the preceding year.
  3. ↑ Son of the man he is addressing.
  4. ↑ Of Tullia's dowry, to be repaid by Dolabella in consequence of her divorce. See Chron. Sum. for 45 B.C.
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