Cicero meanwhile had hurried to the south of Italy.  He found shelter for a while at the farm of a friend near Vibo in Brutii (now the Abruzzi), but found it necessary to leave this place because it was within the prescribed limits.  Sicily was forbidden to him by its governor, who, though a personal friend, was unwilling to displease the party in power.  Athens, which for many reasons he would have liked to choose for his place of exile, was unsafe.  He had bitter enemies there, men who had been mixed up in Catiline’s conspiracy.  The place, too, was within the distance, and though this was not very strictly insisted upon—­as a matter of fact, he did spend the greater part of his banishment inside the prescribed limit—­it might at any moment be made a means of annoyance.  Atticus invited him to take up his residence at his seat at Buthrotum in Epirus (now Albania).  But the proposal did not commend itself to his taste.  It was out of the way, and would be very dreary without the presence of its master, who was still at Rome, and apparently intended to remain there.  After staying for about a fortnight at a friend’s house near Dyrrachium—­the town itself, where he was once very popular, for fear of bringing some trouble upon it, he refused to enter—­he crossed over to Greece, and ultimately settled himself at Thessalonica.

Long afterward he tells us of a singular dream which seems to have given him some little comfort at this time.  “I had lain awake for the greater part of the night, but fell into a heavy slumber toward morning.  I was at the point of starting, but my host would not allow me to be waked.  At seven o’clock, however, I rose, and then told my friend this dream.  I seemed to myself to be wandering disconsolately in some lonely place when the great Marius met me.  His lictors were with him, their fasces wreathed with bays.  ‘Why are you so sad?’ he asked me.  ’I have been wrongly banished from my country,’ I answered.  He then took my hand, and turning to the nearest lictor, bade him lead me to his own Memorial Hall.  ‘There,’ he said, ‘you will be safe.’” His friend declared that this dream portended a speedy and honorable return.  Curiously enough it was in the Hall of Marius that the decree repealing the sentence of banishment was actually proposed and passed.

For the most part he was miserably unhappy and depressed.  In letter after letter he poured out to Atticus his fears, his complaints, and his wants.  Why had he listened to the bad advice of his friends?  He had wished to stay at Rome and fight out the quarrel.  Why had Hortensius advised him to retire from the struggle?  It must have been jealousy, jealousy of one whom he knew to be a more successful advocate than himself.  Why had Atticus hindered his purposes when he thought of putting an end to all his trouble by killing himself?  Why were all his friends, why was Atticus himself, so lukewarm in his cause?  In one letter he artfully reproaches himself for his neglect of his friends in times past as the cause of their present indifference.  But the reproach is of course really leveled at them.