supreme ability, your devotion to the highest learning, and your prospect of the most exalted rank is such that I class no one above you and put very few on an equality with you.
CCCCXCII (F IV, 3)
TO SERVIUS SULPICIUS RUFUS (IN ACHAIA)
Rome (October Or November[1])
Many daily report to me that you are in a state of great
anxiety, and in the midst of miseries affecting all alike are
suffering, as it were, a special personal sorrow. Though not
surprised at this, and to a certain extent sharing in it myself,
yet I am sorry that a man of your all but unequalled wisdom
does not rather feel pleasure in his own blessings, than vexation
at other people's misfortunes. For myself, though I do
not yield to anyone in sorrow experienced from the ruin
and destruction of the constitution, yet I now find many
sources of consolation, and above all in the consciousness of
the policy which I pursued. For far in advance I foresaw
the coming storm, as it were from a watch-tower, and that
not altogether spontaneously, but much more owing to your
warnings and denunciations. For, though I was absent
during the greater part of your consulship, yet in spite of
that absence I was well informed of your sentiments in
taking precautions against and predicting this disastrous
war, and I was myself present in the first period of your
consulship,[2] when, after passing in review all the civil wars,
you warned the senate in the most impressive terms, both
to fear those they remembered, and to feel assured, since
the last generation had been so cruel—to an extent up to
that time unprecedented in the Republic—that whoever
thenceforth overpowered the Republic by arms would be
