[566] Ego, ut sit rata, Schutz's reading, which seems the best for the unintelligible ergo et si irata of the MSS. It would mean, "though I regret not having been back for Domitius's election (if it has taken place), I am glad to have been away from the previous wrangling in the senate."
[567] Crassus starts for Syria; he compares him to L. Æmilius Paullus starting for the war with Perses (B.C. 168). Paullus was, like Crassus, sixty years old, and in his second consulship. Paullus set out with good omens, Crassus with a curse, denounced by the tribune C. Ateius Capito (de Div. i. § 29; Plutarch, Crass. 16).
[568] By his librarii. Atticus was again acting as his publisher.
[569] The date has been lost.
[570] Lit. "has been beheaded with the axe of Tenes," mythical founder and legislator of Tenedos, whose laws were of Draconian severity. A legatio from Tenedos, heard as usual in February, had asked that Tenedos might be made a libera civitas.
[571] Some publicanus who had made a charge on the Magnesians which they considered excessive.
[572] Lucretius seems to have been now dead, according to Donatus 15 October (B.C. 55), though the date is uncertain. I have translated the reading multæ tamen artis, which has been changed by some to multæ etiam artis. But the contrast in the criticism seems to be between the fine poetical passages in the de Rerum Natura and the mass of technical exposition of philosophy which must have repelled the "general reader" at all times. It suggests at once to Cicero to mention another poem on a similar subject, the Empedoclea of Sallustius, of which and its writer we know nothing. It was not the historian.
[573] Retaining populi convicio, and explaining populus to have the general meaning of the crowd, including senators and spectators. Cicero uses populus in this vague way elsewhere.
[574] Zeugma I take to mean the "territory of Zeugma," a town on the Euphrates, part of the Roman province of Syria, and close to the frontier of Commagene. Antiochus had asked that some stronghold should be reckoned as his rather than as belonging to the province.
[575] Appius, he insinuates, hoped to make money by granting the request of Antiochus, left king of Commagene by Pompey, for some special privileges, among which was the right of wearing the toga prætexta, which symbolized some position with a shadow of Roman imperium, while at the same time conveying a compliment to the Roman suzernainty. See Polyb. lib. xxvi.; xxx. 26; Suet. Aug. 60.