XXXII. When it was known that he had fled, Clodius put to the vote the question of his banishment, and issued an edict to exclude him from fire and water, and that no one should furnish him with a shelter within five hundred miles[231] of Italy. Now others paid not the slightest regard to the edict, for they respected Cicero, and showed him all manner of kindness and set him on his way: but in Hipponium, a city of Lucania, which the Romans call Vibo,[232] Vibius, a Sicilian, who had derived many advantages from Cicero's friendship and had been præfect of the Fabri during his consulship, would not receive Cicero in his house, but sent him word that he would assign him a spot of ground; and Caius Vergilius,[233] the prætor of Sicily, who had been most intimate with Cicero, wrote to tell him to keep away from Sicily. Whereat desponding he set out for Brundusium, and thence attempted to pass over to Dyrrachium[234] with a fair wind; but as it began to blow against him when he was out at sea, he came back the day after, and again set sail. It is said that when he had reached Dyrrachium and was going to land, there was a shaking of the earth and a violent motion in the sea at the same time; from which the diviners prognosticated that his flight would not be lasting, for these were signs of change. And though many men visited him from good will and the Greek cities vied in sending deputations to him, yet he passed his time in despondency[235] and exceeding grief, for the most part looking to Italy, like those who are desperately in love, and in his bearing became very mean and humbled by reason of his calamity, and so downcast as no one would have expected from a man who had spent his life in such philosophical pursuits. And yet he often asked his friends to call him not an orator, but a philosopher,[236] for he said that he had chosen philosophy as his occupation, but that he employed oratory as an instrument for his purposes in his public life. But opinion is powerful to wash out reason from the mind as if it were dye, and to imprint the affects of the many[237] by the force of intercourse and familiarity on those who engage in public life, unless a man be strictly on his guard and come in contact with things external in such wise as to have communion with the things themselves, not with the affects towards the things.