Page:Loeb Classical Library L205N (1958).djvu/235

these deputations being allowed any special time or place to deliver their eulogy; that I was pleased with their eagerness to gratify you, because they were grateful to you for your good services, but it seemed to me that the whole principle of the thing was quite unjustified by necessity. However, I added, if they really wished to evince their sense of obligation to you by so doing, in that case if anybody should prove to have performed the function at his own expense, I should commend him; if the expense to the state were within the limits of the law, I should raise no objection; if it were unlimited, I should not allow it. Now what fault can be found with that? Unless it is what you add in your letter, that certain people have got the idea that my edict was, so to speak, deliberately framed for the purpose of obstructing those deputations of yours. Here, indeed, it appears to me that it is not so much those who argue in this way, that do me wrong, as the man who lends a willing ear to such arguments.

⁴ It was at Rome that I drew up the edict, and I added nothing to it but a clause which the publicani when they visited me in Samos asked me to transfer, word for word, from your edict to my own. The paragraph was very carefully drawn up, and relates to the reduction of the expenses of the states, and in it are certain innovations to the advantage of the states which give me much satisfaction; but this particular clause, which gave birth to the suspicion that I had made diligent search for something to cause you offence, is simply a transcript from a previous edict. I really was not so lacking in common-sense, as to imagine that the legates were being sent on their own private affairs; they were