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.[1] 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.[2] 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[3] law-sauce, I here in Hirtian hot-sauce.[4] 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."[5] But it will be my business to see to that: as for. See Theocr. v. 53; Acad. I., § 18.]
- ↑ Cicero tells the story again in Tusc. iii. § 27, but the proverb, "Dionysius in Corinth," in Att. ix. 9 (vol. ii., p. 329) is not, I think, connected with it.
- ↑ Pompey was assassinated in Egypt; Metellus Pius Scipio (Pompey's father-in-law), attempting after Thapsus to escape to Spain, threw himself into the sea to avoid capture; Afranius fell into the hands of Sittius after Thapsus and perished in a military riot. Cicero did not accompany Pompey's army to Pharsalia.
- ↑ Haterius, probably a lawyer with whom Pætus was in some way engaged. There is doubtless a play on the double meaning of ius, "sauce" and "law." A similar metaphor was used on a celebrated occasion in recent years, when certain politicians were recommended to "stew in their Parnellite juice."
- ↑ Of Hirtius, Cicero's instructor in the art of dining, pp. 93, 98.
- ↑ From a Greek proverb, [Greek: us Athênan
