Cicero to C. Scribonius Curio, written from Rome late in 53 BC (the manuscripts give only the year: Scr. Romae a. 701; the conventional date is 8 December). Curio — the future tribune of 50 BC, at this date still a brilliant young man abroad in the East — is about to come home into a quaestorship that will turn into something larger. His agent Rupa had set in motion the declaration of public games in his name, a familiar Roman expedient by which a young man rising toward the magistracies advertised himself to the people with a costly spectacle. Cicero has stopped Rupa, and is writing to explain why before the matter is fixed.

The shape of the letter is the keynote of the whole sub-correspondence with Curio (Fam. 2.1–7): patient, flattering management of a brilliant patrician’s vanity, executed with such formal courtesy that the management almost disappears. The argument itself is sober: games are a matter of means, not of merit (copiarum, non virtutis); no one admires the capacity to put them on; the audience is by now wearied to disgust. Curio possesses what games cannot give him — nature, study, fortune — and the commonwealth needs him in the qualities those gifts have built. The closing flourish is the same clausula Cicero will use again in 2.4: the exhortation to the highest praise, the assurance that no one is dearer. The careful management is the message; the letter exists to forestall a young man’s mistake without letting him feel managed.