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.