He was able before he left to do the people a service, rescuing from the hands of the builder the house of Epicurus, which the council of Areopagus, with as little feeling for antiquity as a modern town council, had doomed.  Then he went on his way, grumbling at the hardships of a sea voyage in July, at the violence of the winds, at the smallness of the local vessels.  He reached Ephesus on July 22nd, without being sea-sick, as he is careful to tell us, and found a vast number of persons who had come to pay their respects to him.  All this was pleasant enough, but he was peculiarly anxious to get back to Rome.  Rome indeed to the ordinary Roman was—­a few singular lovers of the country, as Virgil and Horace, excepted—­as Paris is to the Parisian.  “Make it absolutely certain,” he writes to Atticus, “that I am to be in office for a year only; that there is not to be even an intercalated month.”  From Ephesus he journeys, complaining of the hot and dusty roads, to Tralles, and from Tralles, one of the cities of his province, to Laodicea, which he reached July 31st, exactly three months after starting[8].  The distance, directly measured, may be reckoned at something less than a thousand miles.

[Footnote 8:  Forty-seven days was reckoned a very short time for accomplishing the journey.]

He seems to have found the province in a deplorable condition.  “I staid,” he writes, “three days at Laodicea, three again at Apamca, and as many at Synnas, and heard nothing except complaints that they could not pay the poll-tax imposed upon them, that every one’s property was sold; heard, I say, nothing but complaints and groans, and monstrous deeds which seemed to suit not a man but some horrid wild beast.  Still it is some alleviation to these unhappy towns that they are put to no expense for me or for any of my followers.  I will not receive the fodder which is my legal due, nor even the wood.  Sometimes I have accepted four beds and a roof over my head; often not even this, preferring to lodge in a tent.  The consequence of all this is an incredible concourse of people from town and country anxious to see me.  Good heavens! my very approach seems to make them revive, so completely do the justice, moderation, and clemency of your friend surpass all expectation.”  It must be allowed that Cicero was not unaccustomed to sound his own praises.

Usury was one of the chief causes of this widespread distress; and usury, as we have seen, was practiced even by Romans of good repute.  We have seen an “honorable man,” such as Brutus, exacting an interest of nearly fifty per cent.  Pompey was receiving, at what rate of interest we do not know, the enormous sum of nearly one hundred thousand pounds per annum from the tributary king of Cappadocia, and this was less than he was entitled to.  Other debtors of this impecunious king could get nothing; every thing went into Pompey’s purse, and the whole country was drained of coin to the very uttermost.  In the end, however, Cicero did manage to get twenty thousand pounds for Brutus, who was also one of the king’s creditors.  We cannot but wonder, if such things went on under a governor who was really doing his best to be moderate and just, what was the condition of the provincials under ordinary rulers.