In fine, if I can't be alone I would rather be with downright countryfolk than with such ultra-cockneys. However, I shall, since you don't say anything for certain, wait for you up to the 5th of May. Terentia is much pleased with the attention and care you have bestowed on her controversy with Mulvius. She is not aware that you are supporting the common cause of all holders of public land. Yet, after all, _you_ do pay something to the _publicani_; she declines to pay even that,[236] and, accordingly, she and Cicero--most conservative of boys--send their kind regards. [Footnote 234: The spectacle Cicero hopes for is Clodius's contests with the triumvirs.] [Footnote 235: To Arpinum (see last letter). The verse is not known, and may be a quotation from his own poem on Marius. He often quotes himself.] [Footnote 236: This is not mentioned elsewhere. The explanation seems to be that for the _ager publicus_ allotted under the Sempronian laws a small rent had been exacted, which was abolished by a law of B.C. 111 (the name of the law being uncertain). But some _ager publicus_ still paid rent, and the _publicanus_ Mulvius seems to have claimed it from some land held by Terentia, perhaps on the ground that it was land (such as the _ager Campanus_) not affected by the law of Gracchus, and therefore not by the subsequent law abolishing rent.] XLII (A II, 16) TO ATTICUS (AT ROME) FORMIÆ, 29 APRIL [Sidenote: B.C. 59, ÆT. 47] On the day before the Kalends of May, when I had dined and was just going to sleep, the letter was delivered to me containing your news about the Campanian land. You needn't ask: at first it gave me such a shock that there was no more sleep for me, though that was the result of thought rather than pain. On reflexion, however, the following ideas occurred to me. In the first place, from what you had said in your previous letter--"that you had heard from a friend of his[237] that a proposal was going to be made which would satisfy everybody"--I had feared some very sweeping measure, but I don't think this is anything of the sort. In the next place, by way of consolation, I persuaded myself that the hope of a distribution of land is now all centred on the Campanian territory.[238] That land cannot support more than 5,000, so as to give ten _iugera_ apiece:[239] the rest of the crowd of expectants must necessarily be alienated from them. Besides, if there is anything that more than another could inflame the feeling of the aristocrats, who are, I notice, already irritated, it is this; and all the more that with port-dues in Italy abolished,[240] and the Campanian land divided, what home revenue is there except the five per cent. on manumissions? And even that, I think, it will only take a single trumpery harangue, cheered by our lackeys, to throw away also. What our friend Gnæus can be thinking of I can't imagine-- "For still he blows, and with no slender pipe, But furious blasts by no mouth-band restrained"--