Page:The Letters of Cicero Shuckburg III.pdf/102

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honour, a single day devoted to you will bring a richer return of pleasure than all this time given to most of those with whom I am forced to live. For do not imagine that solitude—and even that, after all, I am not allowed to enjoy—is not pleasanter than the talk of those who crowd my house, with one or at most two exceptions. Accordingly, I fly to that refuge, which I think you should also seek—my darling studies: and, in addition to them, the consciousness of the principles I have maintained. For I am a man, as you will have no difficulty in conceiving, who have never acted for my own interests in preference to those of my fellow citizens: a man of whom, if he whom you never loved—for you loved me—had not been jealous, he would now have been in prosperity, and so would all the loyalists. I am he whose wish was that no man's brute force should be preferred to peace with honour. And again, when I perceived that the very appeal to arms, which I had always dreaded, was to influence the result more than that union of all loyalists (of which I again was the author), I preferred accepting a peace on any terms whatever that were safe to a combat with the stronger. But all this and much else when we meet, as we soon shall. For after all there is nothing to keep me at Rome except the expectation of news from Africa: for the campaign there seems to me to have come to a point when the decisive stroke cannot be far off. Now whatever that news may be, I suppose it is of some importance to me that I should not be out of the way of consulting my friends: I don't, indeed, see clearly what the precise importance is, but nevertheless it must be of some. In fact, it has come to this, that though there is a wide difference between the merits of the two contending sides, I should imagine there will not be much difference between the way they will use their victory. But my courage, which has perhaps been somewhat weak while the result was undecided, now that all is lost, has greatly recovered its tone. You, too, did much to strengthen it by your previous letter, from which I learnt how bravely you were bearing your injurious treatment: and it was helpful to me to find that