DXXXIV (F IV, 14)
TO GNÆUS PLANCIUS (IN CORCYRA)
Rome (January[1])
I have received two letters from you, dated Corcyra. In
one of these you congratulated me because you had heard,
as you say, that I was enjoying my former position; in the
other you said that you wished what I had done might turn
out well and prosperously. Well, certainly, if to entertain
honest sentiments on public affairs and to get good men to
agree with them constitute a "position," then I do hold my
position. But if "position" depends upon the power of
giving effect to your opinion, or in fine of supporting it by
freedom of speech, then I have not a trace of my old
position left: and it is great good fortune if I am able to
put sufficient restraint upon myself to endure without excessive
distress what is partly upon us already and partly
threatens to come. That is the difficulty in a war of this
kind: its result shews a prospect of massacre on the one
side, and slavery on the other. In this danger it affords
me no little consolation to remember that I foresaw all this
at the time when I was feeling greatly alarmed even at our
successes—not merely at our reverses—and perceived at
what immense risk the question of constitutional right was
to be decided in arms. And if in that appeal to arms those
had conquered, to whom, induced by the hope of peace
and not the desire for war, I had given in my adhesion, I
nevertheless was well aware how bloody the victory of men
swayed by anger, rapacity, and overbearing pride was certain
- ↑ Mueller places this letter in the early part of B.C. 46, Klotz in October, B.C. 46 (which I accepted in introduction to vol. i., p. xlv). But it is evidently after the news of his divorce of Terentia and re-marriage with Publilia. This must not only have taken place, but long enough to allow a post to and from Corcyra: and if the divorce took place at the end of B.C. 46—as Klotz in his own table dates it—then the letter belongs to the early part of B.C. 45.
