vil war,
which was to break out in the year after Cicero's return, were already
gathering. At Brundisium, the port of embarkation for the East, he was
detained partly by indisposition, partly by having to wait for one of
his officials for nearly a fortnight. He reached Actium, in
north-western Greece, on the 15th of June. He would have liked to
proceed thence by land, being, as he tells us, a bad sailor, and having
in view the rounding of the formidable promontory Leucate; but there was
a difficulty about his retinue, without which he could not maintain the
state which became a governor _en route_ for his province. Eleven more
days brought him to Athens. "So far," he writes from this place, "no
expenditure of public or private money has been made on me or any of my
retinue. I have convinced all my people that they must do their best for
my character. So far all has gone admirably. The thing has been noticed,
and is greatly praised by the Greeks." "Athens," he writes again,
"delighted me much; the city with all its beauty, the great affection
felt for you" (he is writing, it will be remembered, to Atticus, an old
resident), "and the good feeling towards myself, much more, too, its
philosophical studies." He was able before he left to do the people a
service, rescuing from the hands of the builder the house of Epicurus,
which the council of Areopagus, with as little feeling for antiquity as
a modern town council, had doomed. Then he went on his way, grumbling at
the hardships of a sea voyage in July, at the violence of the winds, at
the smallness of the local vessels. He reached Ephesus on July 22nd,
without being sea-sick, as he is careful to tell us, and found a vast
number of persons who had come to pay their respects to him. All this
was pleasant enough, but he was peculiarly anxious to get back to Rome.
Rome indeed to the ordinary Roman was--a few singular lovers of the
country, as Virgil and Horace, excepted--as Paris is to the Parisian.
"Make it absolutely certain," he writes to Atticus, "that I am to be in
office for a year only; that there is not to be even an intercalated
month." From Ephesus he journeys, complaining of the hot and dusty
roads, to Tralles, and from Tralles, one of the cities of his province,
to Laodicea, which he reached July 31st, exactly three months after
starting[8]. The distance, directly measured, may be reckoned at
something less than a thousand miles.

[Footnote 8: Forty-seven days was r