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Epistulae ad Familiares, I. ix.

mitted a monument[1]—it was not mine, for it was not built out of any spoils of mine, I only gave out the contract for its erection, but a monument belonging to the Senate—to be branded, and that, too, in letters of blood, with the name of a public enemy. Now in so far as these gentlemen promoted my recall, I am deeply grateful to them; but I could wish that they had chosen to have some regard not merely, like doctors, for my recovery, but also, like trainers, for my vigour and healthy appearance. As it is, just as Apelles completed with the most refined art the head and shoulders of his Venus, while he left the rest of her body begun but not finished, so certain people have confined their good offices to my head[2] alone, and have left the rest of me incomplete and only rough-hewn.

16 But in all this I belied the expectations not only 16 of those who envied, but also of those who hated me; for they had heard some time or other an untrue account of that most high-spirited and courageous of men, who, in my opinion, stood out above all others in gallantry and firmness of character, Quintus Metellus,[3] the son of Lucius Metellus, and constantly allege that on his return from exile he was a broken-hearted and dispirited man—it has to be proved however that one who left his country with the utmost readiness, and bore his exile with remarkable cheerfulness, and was not particularly anxious to return, was crushed by just that very episode in which he had proved his superiority in determination and dignity to everybody else in the world, not excepting that extraordinary man, the celebrated M. Scaurus[4]—anyhow what they had heard, or perhaps only imagined, about Metellus,

  1. ↑ Probably (3) in the note on § 5 above. Clodius appears to have effaced the original inscription, and substituted another bearing his own name for Cicero's.
  2. ↑ See note c on § 13 above.
  3. ↑ Q. Metellus Numidicus refused to take the oath of obedience to the agrarian law of Saturninus in 100 B.C., and went into voluntary exile. On the death of Saturninus he was restored by a tribunician law, in 99 B.C.
  4. ↑ M. Scaurus did not refuse to take the above-mentioned oath, and so proved himself a weaker man than Metellus.
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