s, I will do so,
indeed, with a burning zeal: and perhaps I shall manage to accomplish
what is frequently the fortune of travellers when they make great haste,
who, if they have got up later than they intended, have, by increasing
their speed, arrived at their destination sooner than if they had waked
up before daylight. Thus I, since I have long overslept myself in
cultivating that great man, though you, by heaven, often tried to wake
me up, will make up for my slowness with horses and (as you say he likes
my poem) a poet's chariots. Only let me have Britain to paint in colours
supplied by yourself, but with my own brush. But what am I saying? What
prospect of leisure have I, especially as I remain at Rome in accordance
with his request? But I will see. For perhaps, as usual, my love for you
will overcome all difficulties. For my having sent Trebatius to him he
even thanks me in very witty and polite terms, remarking that there was
no one in the whole number of his staff who knew how to draw up a
recognizance. I have asked him for a tribuneship for M. Curtius--since
Domitius (the consul) would have thought that he was being laughed at,
if my petition had been addressed to him, for his daily assertion is
that he hasn't the appointment of so much as a military tribune: he even
jested in the senate at his colleague Appius as having gone to visit
Caesar,[596] that he might get from him at least one tribuneship. But my
request was for next year, for that was what Curtius wished. Whatever
line you think I ought to take in politics and in treating my opponents,
be sure I shall take, and shall be "gentler than any ear-lap." Affairs
at Rome stand thus; there is some hope of the elections taking place,
but it is an uncertain one. There is some latent idea of a
dictatorship,[597] but neither is that confirmed. There is profound calm
in the forum, but it is rather the calm of decrepitude than content.
The opinions I express in the senate are of a kind to win the assent of
others rather than my own:

"Such the effects of miserable war."[598]

[Footnote 596: At Luca in the year B.C. 56.]

[Footnote 597: _Comitia habendi causa_. No such had been appointed since
B.C. 202, and the irregular dictatorship of Sulla in B.C. 82 made the
idea distasteful. Pompey was understood to wish for the appointment, now
and later on. See pp. 326, 335.]

[Footnote 598: [Greek: toiauth' ho tlemon polemos exergazetai] (Eur.
_Supp._ 119).]