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⁵ What do I think about the legions decreed by the Senate for Syria? Well, I rather doubted before whether they would come; now, if the news that there is peace in Syria is received in time, I am quite sure they will not.

As to Marius, the successor to the province, I foresee that he will arrive late, because the Senate has decreed that he must not travel without the legions.

⁶ I have answered one of your letters, I now come to the second. You beg of me to recommend you as strongly as possible to Bibulus: I am perfectly willing to do so, but this seems a good opportunity for a word or two with you; you are the only man of all Bibulus's suite who never informed me how intensely Bibulus disliked me, and that without any apparent cause. It has been reported to me by scores of people that when there was great anxiety at Antioch, and great hopes of me and my army, he repeatedly declared that he would sooner suffer any hardship than be thought to have stood in need of my assistance; that you were keeping this back about your own praetor, from a sense of your duty to him as his quaestor, I did not so much resent, although I heard from time to time how you were being treated. But the man himself, when he wrote to Thermus about the Parthian war, never sent me a syllable, though he knew perfectly well that it was I who had to bear the brunt of that war. He did write to me, but only in reference to his son's augurship; and I, out of sheer pity, and because I had always been very friendly with Bibulus, took particular pains to write to him as courteously as possible. ⁷ Now if he is indiscriminately spiteful (and I have never thought that), I am the less offended as regards