0: That is, to get them seats at the games. See Letter XXVI,
p. 63.]

[Footnote 621: The _porticus_ is a kind of cloister round the
_peristylium_ or _atrium_.]

[Footnote 622: Calventius is said to stand for L. Calpurnius Piso
Caesoninus, the consul of B.C. 58, against whom Cicero's speech was
spoken in B.C. 55 in the senate. He calls him Calventius from his
maternal grandfather, and Marius because--as he had said, in the speech,
Sec. 20--he had himself gone into exile rather than come to open fight with
him; just as Q. Metellus had done in B.C. 100, when, declining to take
the oath to the agrarian law of Saturninus, rather than fight Marius,
who had taken the oath, he went into exile. This seems rather a
roundabout explanation; but no better has been proposed, and, of course,
Quintus, who had lately read the speech, would be able better to
understand the allusion.]

[Footnote 623: _I.e._, with money.]

[Footnote 624: This tragedy of Quintus's never reached Cicero. It was
lost in transit. Perhaps no great loss.]

[Footnote 625: Milo was aedile and had just given some splendid games.]

[Footnote 626: _Maiestas._ He would be liable to this charge, under a
law of Sulla's, for having left his province to interfere in Egypt.]

[Footnote 627: See p. 300.]

[Footnote 628: Apparently referring to the death of his daughter Iulia.]

[Footnote 629: [Greek: deuteras phrontidas] from Eurip. _Hipp._ 436,
[Greek: hai deuterai pos phrontides sophoterai].]

[Footnote 630: Or, "as kindly and critical at once as Aristophanes (of
Byzantium)," as though Quintus had written a Caxtonian criticism of his
son's style.]

[Footnote 631: [Greek: gyothi pos allo kechretai].]

[Footnote 632: Of his poem "On his own Times." Piso in Macedonia, where
he had been unsuccessful with border tribes: Gabinius in going to Egypt
to support Ptolemy. He left many of his soldiers there.]

CXLVIII (A IV, 17 AND PARTS OF 16)

TO ATTICUS (ABROAD)

ROME, 1 OCTOBER

[Sidenote: B.C. 54, AET. 52]

You think I imagine that I write more rarely to you than I used to do
from having forgotten my regular habit and purpose, but the fact is
that, perceiving your locality and journeys to be equally uncertain, I
have never intrusted a letter to anyone--either for Epirus, or Athens,
or Asia, or anywhere else--unless he was going expressly to you. For my
letters are not of the sort to make their non-delivery a matter of
indifference; they contain so ma