5o B.C. was necessarily one of peculiar anxiety. He had embraced the friendship of Cæsar in order to please Pompey, and he never seems to have contemplated the possibility of having to choose between the two. He lays his difficulty with all frankness before his friend in a letter written from Athens in October.[1] "I adjure you, bring to bear all the affection you have for me, and all the sagacity in which I know not your equal, bring them all I say to the task of considering my whole position. For I seem to see such a conflict impending—unless the same Providence which extricated us better than we dared to hope from the Parthian war should again take pity on the State—such a conflict, I say, as the world has never witnessed before. Well, that is a peril I share with the rest, and I do not bid you think of that. It is my own personal problem which I beg you to solve. You see that by your advice I have linked myself to each of them. . . . I have succeeded, and that by constant observances, in making myself a prime friend of both. For my calculation was that, while allied with Pompey, I should never be forced to act against the right, and that in supporting Cæsar I should never find myself in collision with Pompey; so firmly were the two bound together. And now, as you prove to me and as I see, a death-struggle between the two is at hand. . . . What am I to do? I do not mean in the last extremity; for if it comes to war, I see well enough that it is better to be conquered along
- ↑ Ad Att., vii., 1, 2.
