states, while many have been relieved by you from a heavy and
long-standing one. Several cities that had become dilapidated and almost
deserted--of which one was the most famous state in Ionia, the other in
Caria, Samus and Halicarnassus--have been given a new life by you: there
is no party fighting, no civil strife in the towns: you take care that
the government of the states is administered by the best class of
citizens: brigandage is abolished in Mysia; murder suppressed in many
districts; peace is established throughout the province; and not only
the robberies usual on highways and in country places, but those more
numerous and more serious ones in towns and temples, have been
completely stopped: the fame, fortunes, and repose of the rich have been
relieved of that most oppressive instrument of praetorial
rapacity--vexatious prosecution; the expenses and tribute of the states
are made to fall with equal weight on all who live in the territories of
those states: access to you is as easy as possible: your ears are open
to the complaints of all: no man's want of means or want of friends
excludes him, I don't say from access to you in public and on the
tribunal, but even from your house and chamber: in a word, throughout
your government there is no harshness or cruelty--everywhere clemency,
mildness, and kindness reign supreme.

IX. What an immense benefit, again, have you done in having liberated
Asia from the tribute exacted by the aediles a measure which cost me some
violent controversies! For if one of our nobles complains openly that
by your edict, "No moneys shall be voted for the games," you have robbed
him of 200 sestertia, what a vast sum of money would have been paid, had
a grant been made to the credit of every magistrate who held games, as
had become the regular custom! However, I stopped these complaints by
taking up this position--what they think of it in Asia I don't know, in
Rome it meets with no little approval and praise--I refused to accept a
sum of money which the states had decreed for a temple and monument in
our honour, though they had done so with the greatest enthusiasm in view
both of my services and of your most valuable benefactions; and though
the law contained a special and distinct exception in these words, "that
it was lawful to receive for temple or monument"; and though again the
money was not going to be thrown away, but would be employed on
decorating a temple, and would thus appear t