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hesitate to do so; if there is any doubt about it, you must not make the attempt. Of this I can assure you, that if you carry out your enterprise to your satisfaction, you will be applauded before your return by many, and after your return by all; but I can see that any mishap will be fraught with danger because the resolution and the religious difficulty have been brought in. But for my part, while I press you to undertake what cannot fail to bring you glory, I warn you against incurring any conflict, and I return to what I wrote at the beginning of my letter, that men will base their judgement of your whole enterprise, not so much on your policy as on the result.

⁶ But if this plan of procedure in the business seems to you to be dangerous, another course commends itself to us, that if the king has kept faith with those friends of yours who have lent him sums of money throughout your province and the provinces under your command, you should assist him with your troops and supplies, knowing that the nature and geographical position of your province is such, that you would either secure his return by assisting him, or hinder it by ignoring him. How far the circumstances, the cause itself, and the course of events, bear upon this project, nobody will estimate so easily and exactly as yourself; what our opinion was, I thought that I, of all men, was the proper person to tell you.

⁷ You congratulate me on my position, on my intimacy with Milo,^[1] and on the unprincipled but impotent attempts of Clodius; well, I am not in the least surprised that, like some distinguished artist, you take a dehght in your own brilliant achievements;^[2] and yet it is hard to believe the wrong-headedness (I don't like to use a harsher word) of those who,