Plutarch, Cicero
Bernadotte Perrin, Ed.

36. He became also one of the priests whom the Romans call Augurs, in place of the younger Crassus, who had died among the Parthians.¹ Then the lot gave him Cilicia as his province, with an army of twelve thousand men-at-arms and twenty-six hundred horsemen, and he set sail,² with instructions to keep Cappadocia friendly and obedient to King Ariobarzanes. [2] This he accomplished and arranged satisfactorily without war, and seeing that the Cilicians, in view of the Parthian disaster to the Romans and the uprising in Syria, were in an agitated state, he pacified them by his mild government. Gifts he would not receive, not even when the kings offered them, and he relieved the provincials from the expense of entertainments; but he himself daily received men of pleasing accomplishments at banquets which were not expensive, although generous. [3] His house, too, had no door-keeper, nor did anyone ever see him lying a-bed, but early in the morning he would stand or walk in front of his chamber and receive those who came to pay him their respects. It is said, moreover, that he never ordered any man to be chastised with rods or to have his raiment torn from him, and that he never inflicted angry abuse or contumelious punishments. [4] He discovered that much of the public property had been embezzled, and by restoring it he made the cities well-to-do, and men who made restitution he maintained in their civil rights without further penalties. He engaged in war, too, and routed the robbers who made their homes on Mount Amanus;³ and for this he was actually saluted by his soldiers as Imperator. [5] When Caelius the orator asked Cicero to send him panthers from Cilicia for a certain spectacle at Rome, Cicero, pluming himself upon his exploits, wrote to him that there were no panthers in Cilicia; for they had fled to Caria in indignation because they alone were warred upon, while everything else enjoyed peace.⁴ On his voyage back from his province he first touched at Rhodes, and then gladly spent some time at Athens in fond remembrance of his old pursuits in that place. [6] Then, after associating with men who were foremost for their learning, and after greeting his old-time friends and intimates, and after receiving from Greece the tokens of admiration that were his due, he returned to Rome,⁵ where a violent inflammation, as it were, was already forcing matters on towards the civil war.