He had successfully avoided the appointment after his praetorship and again after his consulship.  But the time came when it was forced upon him.  Pompey in his third consulship had procured the passing of a law by which it was provided that all senators who had filled the office of praetor or consul should cast lots for the vacant provinces.  Cicero had to take his chance with the rest, and the ballot gave him Cilicia.  This was in B.C. 51, and Cicero was in his fifty-sixth year.

Cilicia was a province of considerable extent, including, as it did, the south-eastern portion of Asia Minor, together with the island of Cyprus.  The position of its governor was made more anxious by the neighborhood of Rome’s most formidable neighbors, the Parthians, who but two years before had cut to pieces the army of Crassus.  Two legions, numbering twelve thousand troops besides auxiliaries, were stationed in the province, having attached to them between two and three thousand cavalry.

Cicero started to take up his appointment on May 1st, accompanied by his brother, who, having served with distinction under Caesar in Gaul, had resigned his command to act as lieutenant in Cilicia.  At Cumae he received a levee of visitors—­a “little Rome,” he says.  Hortensius was among them, and this though in very feeble health (he died before Cicero’s return).  “He asked me for my instructions.  Every thing else I left with him in general terms, but I begged him especially not to allow as far as in him lay, the government of my province to be continued to me into another year.”  On the 17th of the month he reached Tarentum, where he spent three days with Pompey.  He found him “ready to defend the State from the dangers that we dread.”  The shadows of the civil war, which was to break out in the year after Cicero’s return, were already gathering.  At Brundisium, the port of embarkation for the East, he was detained partly by indisposition, partly by having to wait for one of his officials for nearly a fortnight.  He reached Actium, in north-western Greece, on the 15th of June.  He would have liked to proceed thence by land, being, as he tells us, a bad sailor, and having in view the rounding of the formidable promontory Leucate; but there was a difficulty about his retinue, without which he could not maintain the state which became a governor en route for his province.  Eleven more days brought him to Athens.  “So far,” he writes from this place, “no expenditure of public or private money has been made on me or any of my retinue.  I have convinced all my people that they must do their best for my character.  So far all has gone admirably.  The thing has been noticed, and is greatly praised by the Greeks.”  “Athens,” he writes again, “delighted me much; the city with all its beauty, the great affection felt for you” (he is writing, it will be remembered, to Atticus, an old resident), “and the good feeling towards myself, much more, too, its philosophical studies.”