Cicero to Lentulus Spinther, written from Rome around the fifteenth day before the Kalends of February (18 January) 56 BC, the day after Fam. 1.2. The third dispatch of the week. The Bibulus three-legate motion already broken; the Volcacius-Pompey motion blocked by the procedural calumnies of Curio, Caninius, and Cato (who declared they would carry no law before the elections). The Lex Pupia (a senatorial-procedure law of the late Republic) blocked Senate business before the Kalends of February and bound February itself to embassies — so the chamber would yield no further decision until late in the month at earliest. The keynote of §2 is the public reading of the Sibylline manoeuvre: people see that the religion was brought in by Lentulus’s enviers, less to block him than to keep anyone else (read: Pompey) from coveting the Egyptian command for the army. The closing line is the most rhetorically charged of the three letters — “if I were to pour out my life for your standing, I should still seem to have reached no part of what you have deserved” — and the practical confession that violence is the one thing he cannot guarantee against, given how weak the magistrates are.