M. Tullius Cicero, Letters to his Friends
Evelyn Shuckburgh, Evelyn S. Shuckburgh, Ed.

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CCXII (F III, 6)

When I compare my course of action with yours, though in maintaining our friendship I do not allow myself greater credit than I do you, yet I am more satisfied with my conduct than with yours. For at Brundisium I asked Phania—and I imagined that I saw clearly his fidelity to you and knew what a high place he had in your confidence—to tell me to what part of the province he thought you would like me to come in taking over the succession. Having been answered by him that I could not please you more than by going by sea to Sida, ¹ although the arrival there was not very dignified ² and much less convenient for me on many accounts, I yet said that I would do so. Again, having met L. Clodius in Corcyra—a man so closely attached to you, that in talking to him I seemed to be talking to you—I told him that I meant to arrange for my first arrival to be at the point at which Phania had requested that it should be. Thereupon, after thanking me, he begged me very strongly to go straight to Laodicea: that you wished to be on the very frontier of the province, in order to quit it at the first moment: nay, that, had I not been a successor whom you were anxious to see, you would most likely have quitted before you were relieved. And this last agreed with the letter which I had received in Rome, from which I thought that I perceived how much in a hurry you were to depart. I answered Clodius that I would do so, and with much greater pleasure than if I had had to do what I had promised Phania. Accordingly, I changed my plan and at once sent a letter in my own writing to you; and this, I learnt from your letter, reached you in very good time. With my conduct I am, for my part, quite satisfied; for nothing could be more cordial. Now, on the other hand, consider your own. Not only were you not at the place where you might have seen me earliest, but you had gone such a distance as made it impossible for me to overtake you even, within the thirty days fixed by, I think, the Cornelian law. ³ Such a course of action on your part must appear to those who are ignorant of our feelings to each other to indicate one who, to put it at the mildest, is a stranger and desirous of avoiding a meeting, while mine must seem that of the most closely united and affectionate of friends. And, after all, before reaching my province, I received a letter from you, in which, though you informed me that you were starting for Tarsus, you yet held out no uncertain hope of my meeting you. Meanwhile, certain persons, I am ready to believe out of spite—for that is a vice widely spread and to be found in many—yet who had managed to get hold of some plausible grounds for their gossip, being unacquainted with the constancy of my feelings, tried to alienate my affection from you, by saying that you were holding an assize at Tarsus, were issuing many enactments, deciding actions, delivering judgments, though you might have guessed that your successor had by this time taken over your province—things (they remarked) not usually done even by those who expect to be relieved shortly. I was not moved by the talk of such persons; nay, more, I assure you, that if you performed any official act, I was prepared to consider myself relieved from trouble, and to rejoice that from being a government of a year, which I regarded as too long, it had been reduced nearly to one of eleven months, if in my absence the labour of one month were subtracted. One thing, however, to speak candidly, does disturb me—that, considering the weakness of my military force, the three cohorts which are at their fullest strength should be absent, and that I should not know where they are. But what causes me most annoyance of all is that I do not know where I am likely to see you, and have been the slower to write to you, because I was expecting you in person. from day to day ; and meanwhile I did not receive so much as a letter to tell me what you were doing or where I was to see you. Accordingly, I have sent you the commander of my reserve—men, Decimus Antonius, a gallant officer and possessed of my fullest confidence, to take over the cohorts, if you think well, in order that, before the suitable season of the year is gone, I may be able to accomplish something practical. It was in that department that I had hoped, both from our friendship and your letter, to have the advantage of your advice, of which I do not even now despair. But the truth is that, unless you write to me, I cannot even guess when or where I am to see you. For my part, I will take care that friends and enemies alike understand that I am most warmly attached to you: of your feelings towards me you do appear to have given the ill-disposed some grounds for 'thinking differently: if you will put that straight I shall be much obliged to you. That you may also be able to calculate at what place you may meet me without a breach of the Cornelian law, note this—I entered the province on the last day of July: I am on my way to Cilicia through Cappadocia: I break up the camp from Iconium on this last day of August. ⁴ With these facts before you, if you think by reckoning days and routes you may meet me, please settle at what place that may be most conveniently done, and on what day. ⁵