part, I was in hopes, as I often used actually to say to you, that the
wheel of the state chariot had made its revolution with scarcely any
noise and leaving scarcely any visible rut; and it would have been so,
if people could only have waited till the storm had blown over. But
after sighing in secret for a long time they all began, first to groan,
and at last to talk and shout. Accordingly, that friend of ours,
unaccustomed to being unpopular, always used to an atmosphere of praise,
and revelling in glory, now disfigured in body and broken in spirit,
does not know which way to turn; sees that to go on is dangerous, to
return a betrayal of vacillation; has the loyalists his enemies, the
disloyal themselves not his friends. Yet see how soft-hearted I am. I
could not refrain from tears when, on the 25th of July, I saw him making
a speech on the edicts of Bibulus. The man who in old times had been
used to bear himself in that place with the utmost confidence and
dignity, surrounded by the warmest affection of the people, amidst
universal favour--how humble, how cast down he was then! How ill-content
with himself, to say nothing of how unpleasing to his audience! Oh,
what a spectacle! No one could have liked it but Crassus--no one else in
the world! Not I, for considering his headlong descent from the stars,
he seemed to me to have lost his footing rather than to have been
deliberately following a path; and, as Apelles, if he had seen his
Venus, or Protogenes his Ialysus daubed with mud, would, I presume, have
felt great sorrow, so neither could I behold without great sorrow a man,
portrayed and embellished with all the colours of my art, suddenly
disfigured. Although no one thought, in view of the Clodius business,
that I was bound to be his friend, yet so great was my affection for
him, that no amount of injury was capable of making it run dry. The
result is that those Archilochian edicts of Bibulus against him are so
popular, that one can't get past the place where they are put up for the
crowd of readers, and so deeply annoying to himself that he is pining
with vexation. To me, by Hercules, they are distressing, both because
they give excessive pain to a man whom I have always loved, and because
I fear lest one so impulsive and so quick to strike, and so unaccustomed
to personal abuse, may, in his passionate resentment, obey the dictates
of indignation and anger. I don't know what is to be the end of Bibulus.
As things