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¹ When I compare your action with mine, though I claim no more credit than I give you in the matter of maintaining our friendship, still I find far more satisfaction in my own action than in yours. At Brundisium I inquired of Phania (whose fidelity to yourself I imagined I had thoroughly understood, as I also imagined I knew the place he held in your regard) into what part of the province he supposed you were most anxious that I should come first as your successor. He answered that I could do nothing more agreeable to you than make Sida the end of my voyage; now although to arrive there involved a loss of dignity, and was in many respects less convenient for me, in spite of all that, I told him that I would do so.

² Again when in Corcyra I met L. Clodius, a man so closely connected with you that when I conversed with him it seemed to me that I was conversing with you, I told him that I would make arrangements so as to come first to that part of the province which Phania had specified in his request. And then Clodius, when he had thanked me, earnestly begged of me to go straight on to Laodicea, saying that you wished to be in the part of the province I could most quickly reach,^[1] that you might depart most quickly. Indeed, had I not been such a successor as you particularly wished to meet, that you would have left before your successor had been appointed; and this certainly tallied with the letter I had