Latin Texts & Translations

DCLXVII (F XII, 18)

TO Q. CORNIFICIUS (IN SYRIA) ROME (OCTOBER)

I will answer the end part of your last letter first—for I have noticed that that is what you great orators occasionally do. You express disappointment at not getting letters from me; whereas I never fail to send one whenever I am informed by your family that somebody is going to you. I think I gather from your letter that you are not likely to take any step rashly, nor to decide on any plan before you know in what direction that fellow Caecilius Bassus ^[Note] is likely to break out. That is what I had hoped, for I felt confidence in your wisdom, and now your very welcome letter makes me quite secure. And I beg you as a special favour that you will, as often as you can, make it possible for me to know what you are doing, what is being done, and also what you intend to do. Although I felt much distressed at your leaving me, I consoled myself at the time by thinking that you were going to a scene of the most profound tranquillity, and were leaving the cloud of serious troubles overhanging us. In both cases the actual truth has been the reverse. Where you are a war has broken out: with us there has followed a period of peace. Yet, after all, it is a peace in which, had you been here, there would have been many things that would not have pleased you, things in fact

which do not please Caesar himself. In truth, this is always among the results of civil wars—that it is not only what the victor wishes that is done: concessions have also to be made to those by whose aid the victory was won. For my part, I have become so hardened that at our friend Caesar's games I saw T. Plancus ^[Note] and listened to the poems of Laberius and Publilius ^[Note] with the utmost sangfroid There is nothing I feel the lack of so much as of some one with whom to laugh at these things in a confidential and philosophic spirit. You will be the man, if you will only come as soon as possible. That you should do so I think is important to yourself as well as to me.