Early in the year he declares that he would like to accept a mission to Egypt, offered to him by Cæsar and Pompey, partly in order that he might for a while be quit of Rome, and partly that Romans might feel how ill they could do without him. He then uses for the first time, as far as I am aware, a line from the Iliad,[252] which is repeated by him again and again, in part or in whole, to signify the restraint which is placed on him by his own high character among his fellow-citizens. "I would go to Egypt on this pleasant excursion, but that I fear what the men of Troy, and the Trojan women, with their wide-sweeping robes, would say of me." And what, he asks, would the men of our party, "the optimates," say? and what would Cato say, whose opinion is more to me than that of them all? And how would history tell the story in future ages? But he would like to go to Egypt, and he will wait and see. Then, after various questions to Atticus, comes that great one as to the augurship, of which so much has been made by Cicero's enemies, "quo quidem uno ego ab istis capi possim." A few lines above he had been speaking of another lure, that of the mission to Egypt. He discusses that with his friend, and then goes on in his half-joking phrase, "but this would have been the real thing to catch me." Nothing caught him. He was steadfast all through, accepting no offer of place from the conspirators by which his integrity or his honor could be soiled. That it was so was well known to history in the time of Quintilian, whose testimony as to the "repudiatus vigintiviratus"--his refusal of a place among the twenty commissioners--has been already quoted.[253] And yet biographers have written of him as of one willing to sell his honor, his opinions, and the commonwealth, for a "pitiful bribe;" not that he did do so, not that he attempted to do it, but because in a half-joking letter to the friend of his bosom he tells his friend which way his tastes lay![254] He had been thinking of writing a book on geography, and consulted Atticus on the subject; but in one of his letters he tells his friend that he had abandoned the idea. The subject was too dull; and if he took one side in a dispute that was existing, he would be sure to fall under the lash of the critics on the other. He is enjoying his leisure at Antium, and thinks it a much better place than Rome. If the weather will not let him catch fish, at any rate he can count the waves. In all these letters Cicero asks questions about his money and his private affairs; about the mending of a wall, perhaps, and adds something about his wife or daughter or son. He is going from Antium to Formiæ, but must return to Antium by a certain date because Tullia wants to see the games.