Cicero to C. Scribonius Curio, written from Rome in 53 BC (the manuscripts give only the year: Scr. Romae a. 701). Curio — the future tribune of 50 BC whose veto would become the trigger of the civil war — is at this date a very young man, abroad and full of himself. The letter opens the small sub-correspondence with him preserved in book 2 of the Familiares (2.1–7), the keynote of which is patient, flattering management of a brilliant patrician’s vanity. The hand is light: a survey of the kinds of letter one might write, worked into an apology for sending none of them. Of the playful register Cicero says, by Hercules, no citizen can laugh in these times; of the serious, what is there that he could write weightily to Curio except the commonwealth — and on the commonwealth he dares not write what he thinks and will not write what he does not. The shape is the message: a letter that explains, with elaborate courtesy, why it has nothing in it.

The second section is the real one. Cicero falls back on what he calls his clausula — his standard sign-off to Curio — the exhortation to the highest praise. The figure is forensic: a great expectation has been set up against him as an adversary, and the way to defeat it is to put in the labour in the arts that win the distinctions Curio has come to love. Cicero closes by insisting the prod is not meant to inflame — only to testify to his love. The reader knows already, in 53 BC, that the love is provisional and the flattery interested; the letter is a piece of careful political husbandry of a young man who would one day be useful, or dangerous, or both.