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what to blame for listening to them. My behaviour in the whole course of our friendship will be found consistent and upright. But if anyone makes me out rather a trickster, what can be more artful than, although I have always defended you in your absence—and that too when I never imagined it would come to pass that I also should need your defence in my absence—that I should now make the mistake of putting it in your power to abandon me in my absence with full justification?

⁷ There is one kind of talk I omit from the above category, that in which as very often happens, something is said which I am pretty sure you would resent being said; I mean if any of your legates, or prefects, or military tribunes is abused; I assure you, however, that so far it has never happened in my hearing that even such remarks amounted to anything more offensive or coarse^[1] than that made to me by Clodius at Corcyra, when in that connexion he clamorously complained that your success would have been greater but for the unscrupulous conduct of others. Such remarks, both because they are so common, and because they do no harm, in my opinion, to your reputation, I have never provoked, but neither have I taken much trouble to check them. If anybody supposes that sincere reconciliation is an impossibility, he does not convict me of hypocrisy, but betrays his own; and at the same time he implies no worse an opinion of me than of you. But if anybody is displeased with my policy in the province, and fancies that he is being injuriously treated by a certain dissimilarity between my policy and yours,