He would now let Pompey know what was his standing in Rome.

"If ever," he says to Atticus, "I was strong with my grand rhythm, with my quick rhetorical passages, with enthusiasm, and with logic, I was so now.

Oh, the noise that I made on the occasion! You know what my voice can do.

I need say no more about it, as surely you must have heard me away there in Epirus." The reader, I trust, will have already a sufficiently vivid idea of Cicero's character to understand the mingling of triumph and badinage, with a spark of disappointment, which is here expressed.

"This Pompey, though I have so true to him, has not thought much of me--of me, the great Consul who saved Rome! He has now heard what even Crassus has been forced to say about me.