Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
XXXVI. Cicero became also one of the priests, whom the Romans called
Augurs,[244] in place of the younger Crassus after his death among the
Parthians. The province of Cilicia[245] being allotted to him and an
army of twelve thousand legionary soldiers and two thousand six hundred
horse, he set sail with instructions to keep Cappadocia friendly and
obedient to Ariobarzanes.[246] He accomplished this, and arranged it
without any blame and without war; and as he observed that the
Cilicians were inclined to a rising on occasion of the defeat of the
Romans by the Parthians and the movements in Syria, he pacified them by
a mild administration. Nor would he receive any presents when the kings
offered them, and he relieved the provincials from giving
entertainments: and he himself daily received those who were agreeable
to him at banquets, not in a costly way, but liberally. And there was no
doorkeeper to his house, nor was he ever seen by any one lying down, but
in the morning he would be standing or walking about in front of his
chamber, where he received those who paid their respects[247] to him. It
is said that he neither punished any one with rods nor allowed any man's
garment to be rent, nor vented abuse in passion, nor inflicted any
penalty accompanied with contumelious treatment. By discovering that
much of the public property was embezzled he enriched the cities, and he
maintained in their civil rights those who made restoration, without
letting them suffer anything further. He engaged also in a war in which
he defeated the robbers of Mount Amanus, for which he was saluted by his
soldiers with the title of Imperator.[248] When Cæcilius[249] the orator
requested Cicero to send him panthers from Cilicia to Rome for a certain
spectacle, Cicero, who was proud of his exploits, wrote in reply that
there were no panthers in Cilicia, for they had fled into Caria,
indignant that they were the only things warred upon, while all others
were enjoying peace. On his voyage back from his province he first put
in at Rhodes, and next tarried at Athens with gladness out of the
pleasant recollection of his former residence. After associating with
men the first for wisdom, and visiting his old friends and intimates and
receiving due honours from Greece, he returned to Rome at a time when
affairs, as if from violent inflammation, were bursting out into the
Civil War.
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