one so, he would send home his official account of it all; but
the Parthians may yet come, and there may be danger. "Therefore, O my
Rufus"--he was Caelius Rufus--"see that I am not left here, lest, as you
suspect, things should go badly with me." There is a mixture in all this
of earnestness and of drollery, of boasting and of laughing at what he
was doing, which is inimitable in its reality. His next letter is to his
other young friend, Curio, who has just been elected Tribune. He gives
much advice to Curio, who certainly always needed it.[94] He carries on
the joke when he tells Atticus that the "people of Pindenissum have
surrendered." "Who the mischief are these Pindenissians? you will say. I
have not even heard the name before. What would you have? I cannot make
an AEtolia out of Cilicia. With such an army as this do you expect me to
do things like a Macedonicus?[95] * * * I had my camp on the Issus,
where Alexander had his--a better soldier no doubt than you or I. I
really have made a name for myself in Syria. Then up comes Bibulus,
determined to be as good as I am; but he loses his whole cohort." The
failure made by Bibulus at soldiering is quite as much to him as his own
success. Then he goes back to Laodicea, leaving the army in
winter-quarters, under the command of his brother Quintus.

But his heart is truly in other matters, and he bursts out, in the same
letter, with enthusiastic praise of the line of conduct which Atticus
has laid down for him: "But that which is more to me than anything is
that I should live so that even that fellow Cato cannot find fault with
me. May I die, if it could be done better. Nor do I take praise for it
as though I was doing something distasteful; I never was so happy as in
practising this moderation. The thing itself is better to me even than
the reputation of it. What would you have me say? It was worth my while
to be enabled thus to try myself, so that I might know myself as to what
I could do."

Then there is a long letter to Cato in which he repeats the story of his
grand doings at Pindenissum. The reader will be sure that a letter to
Cato cannot be sincere and pleasant as are those to Atticus and Caelius.
"If there be one man far removed from the vulgar love of praise, it is
I," he says to Cato.[96] He tells Cato that they two are alike in all
things. They two only have succeeded in carrying the true ancient
philosophy into the practice of the Forum. Never surely were two