Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/229

61 B.C.] the end of the year he set out to take up the government of the province of Asia. He had wished his brother-in-law Atticus to accompany him as legate, but this Atticus declined, as he had always declined any participation in official life. Quintus considered himself slighted at the refusal, and he was likewise deeply offended about other matters of which we have only obscure hints. It seems probable, however, that his wife Pomponia had stirred up ill-will between her husband and her brother, for Marcus Cicero writes : "Where the blame for this mischief lies, I can guess more easily than I can write it; for I am afraid lest in excusing my kinsfolk I should he hard on yours. For I judge that the breach, if it were not caused by those of his own household, might at any rate easily have been healed by them."

Cicero laboured anxiously to reconcile his brother and his friend, both equally dear to him. "All my hopes of allaying this irritation," he writes to Atticus, "are placed in your kindliness. For if you hold with me that the tempers of the best men are often easily excited and again as easily quieted down, and that this mobility and fluidity, if I may so speak, is often the characteristic of a kindly nature, and, which is the main point of all, that we ought to bear with whatever we find in each other that is inconsiderate or faulty or aggressive, I hope and believe that this unpleasantness may easily be got over. I beseech you to do this; for to me, who love you