you learn that
the men who exiled you are flourishing. In general the successes of men
are vain and ephemeral, and the higher a man climbs as a result of them
the more easily, like a breath, does he fall, especially in partisan
conflicts. Borne along in a tumultuous and unstable medium they differ
little, or rather not at all, from ships in a storm, but are carried up
and then down, now hither, now yon; and if they make the slightest
error, they sink altogether. Not to mention Drusus or Scipio or the
Gracchi or some others, remember how Camillus the exile later came off
better than Capitolinus, and remember how much Aristides subsequently
surpassed Themistocles.

"Do you, then, as well, entertain a strong hope that you will be
restored; for you have not been expelled on account of wrong doing, and
the very ones who drove you forth will, as I take it, seek for you,
while all will miss you. [-28-] But if you continue in your present
state,--as give yourself no care about it, even so. For if you lean to
my way of thinking you will be quite satisfied to pick out a little
estate on the coast and there carry on at the same time farming and some
historical writing, like Xenophon, like Thucydides. This form of
learning is most lasting and most adaptable to every man, every
government, and exile brings a leisure in some respects more productive.
If, then, you wish to become really immortal, like those historians,
imitate them. Necessities you have in sufficiency and you lack no
measure of esteem. And, if there is any virtue in it, you have been
consul. Nothing more belongs to those who have held office a second, a
third, or a fourth time, except an array of idle letters which benefit
no man, living or dead. Hence you would not choose to be Corvinus or
Marius, the seven times consul, rather than Cicero. Nor, again, are you
anxious for any position of command, seeing that you withdrew from one
bestowed upon you because you scorned the gains to be had from it and
scorned a brief authority that was subject to the scrutiny of all who
chose to practice sycophancy, matters I have mentioned not because any
one of them is requisite for happiness, but because, since it was best,
you have been engaged in politics enough to learn from it the difference
in lives and to choose the one but reject the other, to pursue the one
but avoid the other.

"Our life is but short and you ought not to live all of it for others,
but by this time to gran