[656] B.C. 59, when Vatinius proposed the law for Cæsar's five years' rule in Gaul.
[657] B.C. 56.
[658] Pompey is only speaking metaphorically. Quintus had guaranteed Cicero's support. Pompey half-jestingly speaks as though he had gone bail for him for a sum of money.
[659] Q. Cæcilius Metellus Numidius, expelled from the senate and banished B.C. 100 for refusing the oath to the agrarian law of Saturninus, but recalled in the following year. Cicero is fond of comparing himself with him. See Letter [CXLVII].
[660] M. Æmilius Scaurus, consul B.C. 115 and 108, censor 109, and long princeps senatus. Cicero comments elsewhere on his severitas (de Off. § 108).
[661] Plato, Crit. xii.
[662] Like the character in the play (Terence, Eun. 440), if the nobles annoyed Cicero by their attentions to P. Clodius, he would annoy them by his compliments to Publius Vatinius.
[663] The beginning of the letter is lost, referring to the acquittal of Gabinius on a charge of maiestas.
[664] γοργεῖα γυμνά, "mere bugbears."
[665] Antiochus Gabinius was tried, not for treason (maiestas), but under the lex Papia, for having, though a peregrinus, acted as a citizen; but he says "will not acquit me of treason," because he means to infer that his condemnation was really in place of Gabinius, whose acquittal had irritated his jury; therefore he was practically convicted of maiestas instead of his patron Gabinius. I have, accordingly, ventured to elicit the end of a hexameter from the Greek letters of the MS., of which no satisfactory account has been given, and to read Itaque dixit statim "respublica lege maiestatis οὐ σοί κεν ἄρ' ἶσα μ' ἀφείη (or ἀφιῇ)." The quotation is not known. Antiochus Gabinius was doubtless of Greek origin and naturally quoted Greek poetry. Sopolis was a Greek painter living at Rome (Pliny, N. H. xxxv. §§ 40, 43).