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Epistulae ad Familiares, VI. xx.-xxi.

happen, if anything either hinders or stops him, you will be so placed as to find out all that is going on. I am most decidedly of that opinion.

3 For the rest, as I have frequently urged you to do by letter, I pray you assure yourself of this, that in your position you have nothing you need fear beyond the catastrophe in which the whole state is involved. And though that is most grave, still we have so lived, and are now of such an age, that we ought to bear with fortitude anything that may happen to us through no fault of our own. All your people here are well and are most loyal in their longing for your return, and in their regard and veneration for you. Mind you keep well yourself and do not stir, without good reason, from where you are.

XXI

Cicero to the same

Ficulea (?), April (?), 45 B.C.

1 Although, as I write these words, it seems that the end of this most disastrous war is approaching,[1] or at any rate that something definite has at last been done and accomplished, still not a day passes without my remarking that you were the one man in all that army[2] who agreed with me, as I with you, and that we alone understood the vast amount of evil that war entailed—a war in which, all hope of peace being ruled out, conquest itself was predestined to be full of bitterness, since it would either bring ruin upon you if defeated, or enslavement if victorious. And therefore I, whom those wise and gallant men, the Domitii and Lentuli, accused of being afraid,—

  1. ↑ The news of Caesar's victory at Munda had not yet arrived, but such news was daily expected.
  2. ↑ The Pompeian army at Dyrrachium. Cicero found such fault with the whole conduct of the war that Pompey is said to have wished that he would go over to Caesar.
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