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What I am expecting to hear from you is, what Arrius says, and how he endures being left in the lurch, and who are intended to be consuls is it Pompey and Crassus, or, as I am told in a letter, Servius Sulpicius with Gabinius? and whether there are any new laws or anything new at all; and, since Nepos is leaving Rome, who is to have the augurship the one bait by which those personages could catch me!
But was it possible for you to stand for the augurship at a time when Curio was not in Italy? or even at the time when you were elected, could you have got the votes of one single tribe without the aid of Curio? whose intimate friends even were convicted of violence for having been too zealous in your favour. III. But I availed myself of your friendly assistance. Of what assistance?
Because he jokes about the augurship, we are told how miserably base he was, and how ready to sell his country! During the whole of the last year he must have been tortured by various turns of mind. Had he done well in joining himself to Pompey? and having done so, had he done well in severing himself, immediately on Pompey's death, from the Pompeians?
For other offices, though almost equal in point of dignity to this, may be bestowed one day and taken away the next, while with the augurship the element of chance only enters into the bestowal of it.
He is writing from one of his villas to his friend in Rome, and asks for the news of the day: Who are to be the new consuls? Who is to have the vacant augurship?
The writer of the biographical notice in the Encyclopedia Britannica on Cicero, sends down to posterity a statement that in the time of the first triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of Cæsar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be bought. The augurship would have bought him.
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.
But you did not do so, nor, if you had wished it, would Caius Curio have ever suffered you to do so. You have said, that you retired in my favour from the contest for the augurship. Oh the incredible audacity! oh the monstrous impudence of such an assertion!
The senate had made difficulties: but one of the fruits of the triumvirate was a measure for doing it. It is curious that Cicero speaks of the pauci just as his opponent Cæsar and Augustus after him. Vatinius did not get the augurship. Are they going to deny that Publius has been made a plebeian? This is indeed playing the king, and is utterly intolerable.
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