“Instead of using the common arguments to dissuade you from this weakness, I will endeavour to convince you, that you are really guilty of it, and leave the cure to your own good sense.  For perhaps, you are not yet persuaded that this is your crime, you have probably never yet been reproached for it to your face, and what you are now told, comes from one unknown, and it may be, from an enemy.  You will allow yourself indeed to be prudent in the management of your fortune; you are not a prodigal, like Clodius[10] or Catiline, but surely that deserves not the name of avarice.  I will inform you how to be convinced.  Disguise your person; go among the common people in Rome; introduce discourses about yourself; inquire your own character; do the same in your camp, walk about it in the evening, hearken at every tent, and if you do not hear every mouth censuring, lamenting, cursing this vice in you, and even you for this vice, conclude yourself innocent.  If you are not yet persuaded, send for Atticus,[11] Servius Sulpicius, Cato or Brutus, they are all your friends; conjure them to tell you ingenuously which is your great fault, and which they would chiefly wish you to correct; if they do not all agree in their verdict, in the name of all the gods, you are acquitted.

“When your adversaries reflect how far you are gone in this vice, they are tempted to talk as if we owed our success, not to your courage or conduct, but to those veteran troops you command, who are able to conquer under any general, with so many brave and experienced officers to lead them.  Besides, we know the consequences your avarice hath often occasioned.  The soldier hath been starving for bread, surrounded with plenty, and in an enemy’s country, but all under safeguards and contributions; which if you had sometimes pleased to have exchanged for provisions, might at the expense of a few talents in a campaign, have so endeared you to the army, that they would have desired you to lead them to the utmost limits of Asia.  But you rather chose to confine your conquests within the fruitful country of Mesopotamia, where plenty of money might be raised.  How far that fatal greediness of gold may have influenced you, in breaking off the treaty[12] with the old Parthian King Orodes,[13] you best can tell; your enemies charge you with it, your friends offer nothing material in your defence; and all agree, there is nothing so pernicious, which the extremes of avarice may not be able to inspire.

“The moment you quit this vice, you will be a truly great man; and still there will imperfections enough remain to convince us, you are not a god.  Farewell."_