Latin Texts & Translations

DIV (F XIII, 66)

TO P. SERVILIUS VATIA ISAURICUS (IN ASIA) ROME

I SHOULD not have undertaken to recommend Aulus Caecina ^[Note] to you, who is a client of your family in a very special sense, as I was fully aware how loyal to your friends and how indulgent to men in exile you were ever wont to be, had not both the memory of his father, with whom I was

exceedingly intimate, and his own misfortune affected me as that of a man most closely united to me by mutual interests and good services of every kind was bound to do. I ask with all my might as a favour from you—with an earnestness indeed and heartfelt anxiety beyond which I cannot go in asking anything—that you would allow a letter from me to add a finishing stroke to what, without anyone's recommendation, you would have spontaneously done for a man of such high and noble character, labouring under so heavy a calamity. Let it induce you to be even more zealous in assisting him in whatever ways you may have the power of doing so. If you had been at Rome, we should—as I think—have even secured Aulus Caecina's recall by your assistance. Of this, after all, I still have a strong hope, relying on the forgiving nature of your colleague. ^[Note] For the present, as in reliance on your sense of justice he has concluded your province to be his safest harbour of refuge, I beg and beseech you again and again to assist him in collecting the remnants of his old business, and to protect and watch over him in all other matters. You can do nothing that will oblige me more.