t when the time
comes for paying you your debts I shall have to renew the bill. * * * To
make me do such work as this is putting a saddle upon a cow"--cutting a
block with a razor, as we should say--"clearly I am not made for it; but
I will bear it, so that it be only for one year."[84]

From Laodicea, a town in Phrygia, he went west to Synnada. His province,
known as Cilicia, contained the districts named on the map of Asia Minor
as Phrygia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, part of Cappadocia, Cilicia, and the
island of Cyprus. He soon found that his predecessors had ruined the
people. "Know that I have come into a province utterly and forever
destroyed," he says to Atticus.[85] "We hear only of taxes that cannot
be paid, of men's chattels sold on all sides, of the groans from the
cities, of lamentations, of horrors such as some wild beast might have
produced rather than a human being. There is no room for question. Every
man is tired of his life; and yet some relief is given now, because of
me, and by my officers, and by my lieutenants. No expense is imposed on
any one. We do not take even the hay which is allowed by the Julian
law--not even the wood. Four beds to lie on is all we accept, and a roof
over our heads. In many places not even that, for we live in our tents.
Enormous crowds therefore come to us, and return, as it were, to life
through the justice and moderation of your Cicero. Appius, when he knew
that I was come, ran away to Tarsus, the farthest point of the
province." What a picture we have here of the state of a Roman
dependency under a normal Roman governor, and of the good which a man
could do who was able to abstain from plunder! In his next letter his
pride expresses itself so loudly that we have to remember that this man,
after all, is writing only his own secret thoughts to his bosom friend.
"If I can get away from this quickly, the honors which will accrue to me
from my justice will be all the greater, as happened to Scaevola, who was
governor in Asia only for nine months."[86] Then again he declares how
Appius had escaped into the farthest corner of the province--to
Tarsus--when he knew that Cicero was coming.

He writes again to Appius, complaining. "When I compare my conduct to
yours," he says, "I own that I much prefer my own."[87] He had taken
every pains to meet Appius in a manner convenient to him, but had been
deceived on every side. Appius had, in a way unusual among Roman
governors, carried on his