That you are missing my declamations costs you nothing; that you would envy Hirtius, if you did not love him, there was no cause for envy — unless, perhaps, you envy him his eloquence itself rather than the fact that he is being heard by me. For we, my most charming Volumnius, are plainly nothing at all — or at any rate displease ourselves — now that we are deprived of those old comrades, the friends to whose applause we used to flourish: so that even when at any time we have launched something worthy of our name, we groan that “these weapons are being practised on a feathered body, not on an armed one,” as Philoctetes says in Accius, “with glory thrown aside.”

But still, everything will look brighter to me if you come; though you will be arriving, as you know yourself, into what is practically a collision of overwhelming occupations. If we ride those out as we hope to, then truly I shall bid a hearty farewell to the Forum and to the Senate House, and live much with you and with our mutual admirers. For both your Cassius and our Dolabella — or rather, both of them ours — are held by the same pursuits, and have in me a most receptive listener. There is a need here of your finely-filed and polished judgement, and of that more recondite learning of yours [Greek corrupt: lectio incerta], by which you often make me more diffident in speaking. For I have made up my mind — if only Caesar will either permit this or wish it — to lay aside at last the role in which I have often won approval even from him, and to bury myself wholly in literary studies, and to enjoy in your company and that of others like-minded a leisure of the most honourable kind. I could wish that you had not been afraid that I might read your letter through more than once, if perhaps you sent me longer ones — as you write you might have done. And I should like you to lay it down henceforth that the longer your letters to me are, the more welcome they will be.