Cicero to M. Caelius Rufus, written from Athens on the 6th of July 51 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Athenis prid. Non. Quint. a. 703 (51)), on the day of his departure for the province of Cilicia. This is, in effect, the charter for the run of Roman-news letters from Caelius which will run from Fam 8.1 through the rest of Cicero’s eastern year. Cicero has now received Caelius’s first dispatch — the cover-letter with the hired bulletin-compiler’s roll attached — and is writing back to redirect the service. He does not want the gladiator-matches and court-day-postponements that a professional Roman news-sheet supplied; he wants the political weather, and in particular the future, read by the sharpest political intelligence in his circle. The line about Caelius being the most [Greek: politikoteron] man Cicero knows is half-flattery, half-genuine, and entirely characteristic of the relationship.

The middle paragraph reports the substance of Cicero’s long stop with Pompey at Tarentum on the way east: many days of conversations on the state, which cannot be written down, and a verdict that Pompey is sound. Caelius is told to attach himself to him — a strategic prescription that the events of the next eighteen months will sorely test. The final paragraph gives the practical commission that frames the whole correspondence: Cicero is leaving Athens for his province on this very day; the one thing he wants Caelius to manage in his absence is that the year of the Cilician command not be extended. The means and moment of doing so are left to Caelius’s discretion — a vote of confidence, and a piece of business that will recur in nearly every letter Cicero writes back from Cilicia.