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 in the forum is lost—to keep a kind of school, just as Dionysius, when expelled from Syracuse, is said to have opened a school at Corinth. In short, I too am delighted with the idea, for I secure many advantages. First and foremost, I am strengthening my position in view of the present crisis, and that is of primary importance at this time. How much that amounts to I don't know: I only see that as at present advised I prefer no one's policy to this, unless, of course, it had been better to have died. In one's own bed, I confess it might have been, but that did not occur: and as to the field of battle, I was not there. The rest indeed—Pompey, your friend Lentulus, Afranius—perished ingloriously. But, it may be said, Cato died a noble death. Well, that at any rate is in our power when we will: let us only do our best to prevent its being as necessary to us as it was to him. That is what I am doing. So that is the first thing I had to say. The next is this: I am improving, in the first place in health, which I had lost from giving up all exercise of my lungs. In the second place, my oratorical faculty, such as it was, would have completely dried up, had I not gone back to these exercises. The last thing I have to say, which I rather think you will consider most important of all, is this: I have now demolished more peacocks than you have young pigeons! You there revel in Haterian law-sauce, I here in Hirtian hot-sauce. Come then, if you are half a man, and learn from me the maxims which you seek: yet it is a case of "a pig teaching Minerva." But it will be my business to see to that: as for. See Theocr. v. 53; Acad. I., § 18.]