Cicero to M. Caelius Rufus, curule aedile, written from the Cilician camp shortly before the sixth day before the Kalends of Quintilis (26 June) 50 BC (Perseus dateline: Scr. in castris in Cilicia paulo ante vi K. Quint. a. 704 (50)). The setting is the summer encampment Cicero had mentioned in Fam 2.13 as the last station before his intended departure: news from Rome has been slow and fragmentary, and the disorder of the spring’s public meetings is still reaching him by old report rather than by Caelius’s customary newsletter.

The middle section is the most famous of all the homesick passages in the letters. Cicero has just parted at Pessinus from two friends of Caelius’s, Diogenes and Philo, who are pressing on into the Anatolian interior to Adiatorix — and the contrast between their road and his own breaks open into the Urbem, mi Rufe peroration: hold to the City, live in her light, all foreign service is squalid and obscure for men whose industry can shine at Rome. The closing section converts the same feeling into politics: he hopes he has won the praise of integrity, and the modest possibility of a triumph is not worth the months of separation it would cost. A note in three movements — anxious, longing, weary — closing with the standing request for Caelius’s newsletter to meet him on the homeward road.