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 supreme ability, your devotion to the highest learning, and your prospect of the most exalted rank is such that I class no one above you and put very few on an equality with you.

CCCCXCII (F IV, 3)

TO SERVIUS SULPICIUS RUFUS (IN ACHAIA)

Many daily report to me that you are in a state of great anxiety, and in the midst of miseries affecting all alike are suffering, as it were, a special personal sorrow. Though not surprised at this, and to a certain extent sharing in it myself, yet I am sorry that a man of your all but unequalled wisdom does not rather feel pleasure in his own blessings, than vexation at other people's misfortunes. For myself, though I do not yield to anyone in sorrow experienced from the ruin and destruction of the constitution, yet I now find many sources of consolation, and above all in the consciousness of the policy which I pursued. For far in advance I foresaw the coming storm, as it were from a watch-tower, and that not altogether spontaneously, but much more owing to your warnings and denunciations. For, though I was absent during the greater part of your consulship, yet in spite of that absence I was well informed of your sentiments in taking precautions against and predicting this disastrous war, and I was myself present in the first period of your consulship, when, after passing in review all the civil wars, you warned the senate in the most impressive terms, both to fear those they remembered, and to feel assured, since the last generation had been so cruel—to an extent up to that time unprecedented in the Republic—that whoever thenceforth overpowered the Republic by arms would be