Cicero to M. Caelius Rufus, written from the army camp at Pindenissus in the Cilician highlands on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of December (15 November) 51 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in castris ad Pindenissum a. d. xvii K. Decembr. a. 703 (51)). Cicero is now in the twenty- fifth day of the siege of the mountain town from which Fam 2.9 was already written; the news of Caelius’s election as aedile, which had reached him just before the previous letter, has been followed by silence from Rome, and he opens this one complaining that no letter of Caelius has come through since the elections themselves — and worrying that perhaps his own letters are similarly failing to arrive. The dry self-mockery of balbus enim sum (“stammerer that I am”) is a sideways gesture at the Hirrus-pastiche of Fam 2.9; the joke is allowed one more pass and then dropped: “we are not stammerers — let us return to the matter.”

The body of the letter is Cicero’s first narrative summary of the Cilician campaign to a correspondent who is neither Atticus nor a military colleague. It compresses the work of three months into one paragraph: the rumour of the Parthian war, the position taken on the Amanus, Cassius’s successful repulse of the Parthians from Antioch (which has spared Cicero’s province the brunt of the invasion), the punitive operation against the Amanienses, the salutation as imperator at Issus on the field of Alexander’s victory, and the twenty-five-day investment of Pindenissus that is still in progress as he writes. The closing turn is the standing private commission: be watchful, my Rufus — send me a successor, or at least no prorogation. Caelius had written that the matter would not move; Cicero accepts the assessment but still asks. The letter is dated four days before Caelius’s Fam 8.10, and the two will have crossed at sea.