Say, rather, that you yourself are increasing his difficulties. For he
 destroyed the fleets of the pirates, their cities, and harbours, and places of refuge. By his
 surpassing valour and incredible rapidity of motion he established a maritime peace; but this he
 neither undertook nor ought to have undertaken,—namely, to submit to appear worthy of
 prosecution if a single pirate's boat was anywhere seen. Therefore he himself in Asia, when he
 had terminated every war, both by land and sea, nevertheless levied a fleet on those self-same
 cities. And if he then thought that step was necessary, when everything might have been safe and
 tranquil through fear of his name, while he was still in those countries, what do you think that
 Flaccus ought to have decided on and to have done after he had departed? What? did not we decree, by the advice of Pompeius himself, in the consulship of Silanus and
 Murena, that a fleet should put to sea to sail round Italy? Did not we, at the very same time
 that Lucius Flaccus was levying sailors in Asia, exact four millions three hundred thousand
 sesterces for fleets to defend the Mediterranean and Adriatic? What did we do the year after?
 was not money exacted for the use of the fleet when Marcus Curius and Publius Sextilius were
 quaestors? What? were there not all this time cavalry on the sea-coast? for that is the
 surpassing glory of Pompeius,—first of all, that those pirates who, when the conduct of the
 maritime war was first entrusted to him, wandered about straggling over the whole sea, were soon
 reduced under our power; in the next place, that Syria is ours, that Cilicia is occupied by us,
 that Cyprus, through the instrumentality of king Ptolemaeus, is reduced to a state in which it
 can venture to do nothing; moreover, that Crete, owing to the valour of Metellus, is ours; that
 the pirates have now no ports from which they can set out none to which they can return; that
 all the bays, and promontories, and shores, and islands, and maritime cities, are now contained
 within the barriers of our empire.