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M. Caelius; and you also have written a good deal about that same talk of his. Now for my own part I should have been more ready to break off a longstanding connexion with a man who had undertaken the representation of your enemies than to form any fresh connexion with him. You ought to have no doubt as to my devotion to you; it is obvious to everybody in the province, and it was obvious at Rome.

⁶ And yet there is a hint in your letter of a certain suspicion and doubt in your mind, about which this is not the right time to expostulate with you, but it is the time to clear myself, and I must. When did I ever stand in the way of any deputation being sent to Rome to eulogize you? Or how, if I were your public enemy, could I have done less to injure you, if your private enemy, how could I have shown my hostility more openly? But supposing I were as treacherous as they who heap such charges on my head, even then I am sure I should not have been such a fool as openly to parade my hostilities where I wished to keep my hatred dark, or on the other hand to betray an eager desire to do you harm by an act which would do you no harm at all. I remember some people coming to me, it must have been from Epictetus,^[1] to inform me that extravagant sums were being voted to meet the expenses of certain legates: my reply to them, which was not so much a command as an expression of opinion, was that sums for that purpose should be voted as nearly as possible in accordance with the Cornelian law.^[2] And as evidence that I did not obstinately insist even upon that, there are the accounts of the states, in which the amount each state desires is entered as paid over to your legates.