Cicero to C. Scribonius Curio, written from Rome on 6 October 53 BC (the manuscripts give only the year, Scr. Romae a. 701; the conventional date follows Shackleton Bailey’s chronology). Curio is by now finishing his quaestor- service in Asia and on the slow road home — the same return journey that Fam 2.6 looks forward to in the spring. The ostensible occasion is a complaint Curio had evidently raised that Cicero was not writing often enough. Cicero’s reply is a small set-piece of friendly counter-litigation: the charge is welcome because it shows the affection, but on the merits it is false; he has given a letter to every plausible courier, and it is Curio who has sent only two or three short ones. He threatens, in mock-forensic form, to bring the same charge back the other way.

The second section turns to the standard clausula that recurs through the book 2 letters: a careful mixture of compliment and counsel. Curio’s long absence abroad has been a loss to Cicero personally and a gain to Curio’s career; fortune, Cicero says, has answered all his wishes for his prot\’eg\’e. The note of warning is barely veiled. The expectatio that Curio has built up around himself — the same heavy adversary set up against him in Fam 2.4 — will have to be sustained when he comes home; he should return conformatus, shaped for the part. The closing turn is the most disclosing line in the small Curio correspondence: whatever Curio has won, Cicero says, he could not have won had he not as a boy obeyed Cicero’s counsels, and so Cicero’s now-heavy years deserve to find their rest in Curio’s love and youth. The patronage is being invoiced. Within three years, the prot\’eg\’e who is here being reminded of his debts would be Caesar’s man at the tribune’s bench, and the debt would not be paid.