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ill-feeling towards others; on the contrary, it is as great and exalted as it is ingenuous and artless. I have myself noticed that certain folk have behaved towards you as you might have noticed they also behaved towards me; what has affected me, would surely also, I am sure, have affected you.

But whensoever it may be that I have the benefit of your presence here, you will be the guiding spirit in all my undertakings, and you will be as solicitous for my position, as you were for my restoration. In any event you will have in me a partner and a comrade in all your proceedings, expressions of opinion, and desires, in a word, in everything, and I shall have no purpose so constantly before my eyes as long as I live, as that of making you daily and increasingly rejoice that you have been to me the best of friends.

²³ You ask me to send you whatever I have written since your departure; well, I have certain speeches which I shall give Menocritus to bring you, but there are not so very many of them, so don't be alarmed. I have also written (you see I am more or less disengaging myself from the lure of oratory and returning to the gentler Muses, who are now, as they ever have been from my earliest youth, my chief delight), I have written, I say, on the model of Aristotle—at least that is how I wanted to do it—three books in the form of a discussion and dialogue, entitled The Orator, which I think will be of some use to your son Lentulus; for they disagree entirely with the commonly accepted rules, and embrace all the theories of rhetoric held by the ancients, including those of Aristotle and Isocrates. Furthermore, I have written three books in verse on My Own Times,^[1]