Cicero to C. Scribonius Curio, written from the field before Pindenissus on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of January, 51 BC (Perseus: in castris ad Pindenessum a d. xiv K. Ianuar. a. 703) — i.e. 19 December, only a few days before the siege of the Eleutherocilician stronghold would come to its end on the day of the Saturnalia. The salutation M. Cicero imp. s. d. C. Curioni tr. pl. marks two political facts at once: Cicero has been acclaimed imperator by his army after the Amanus campaign, and Curio has at last entered the tribunate of the plebs that the previous letters of book 2 had taken as the still-distant prospect. The congratulation is therefore late, and Cicero opens with the defence of a man who hears things on a six weeks’ delay from the edge of the empire. The seriousness of the letter is the seriousness, by now familiar, of Cicero’s whole Curio correspondence: this is the elder man writing to a brilliant younger one whom he has long claimed as a pupil, with the flattery of pupillage and the steadiness of one who would like to control where he can only advise.

The set-piece is the moral-tutor refrain at the heart of §1–2: speak with yourself, take yourself into counsel, listen to yourself, obey yourself. Cicero presses it twice, once as opening exhortation and once as recapitulation, and in between he turns to the broader theme of how Curio has come into office: not stumbled into the moment but chosen it, brought his tribunate forward into the very crisis of affairs. He catalogues, with rhetorical question, what the young tribune must reckon with — the force of times, the variety of things, the uncertainty of outcomes, the pliability of wills, the snares and emptiness of public life. The flattery is open: Curio does not need outside counsel, and yet (the immortal gods are invoked) Cicero wishes he were there as spectator or sharer or ally. §3 sets up the next dispatch and points Curio to a separate letter sent with his freedman Thraso about his priesthood. §4 is the substantive request — the standing refrain of every letter Cicero is writing from Cilicia: do not let my term be extended. The wording is calibrated to Curio’s new office: he asks now not from one who was merely a senator, but from a tribune of the plebs, and from Curio the tribune — not that something new be decreed (the harder thing) but that nothing new be decreed, that the senatus consultum and the laws be defended, and that the condition under which Cicero set out remain his. The whole letter is the older man’s careful work of investing in the young one before the young one’s own course is fixed; within a year and a half Curio will have crossed to Caesar and be on the way to the death in Africa that begins the civil war.