Cicero to M. Caelius Rufus, curule aedile, written from Laodicea in February 50 BC (Perseus dateline: Scr. Laudiceae m. Febr. a. 704 (50)). A single short paragraph, with no further fixing of the day — one of the briefest letters in the correspondence.

The whole letter is a commendation: Cicero asks Caelius to take up the business of M. Fadius as if it were Cicero’s own, brushes aside in advance the standard patron’s excuse (“you great patrons — one has to commit murder before you’ll bestir yourselves”), and closes with the by-now-standing complaint that the winter weather has cut off the flow of city news. Read alongside the longer Caelius letters of these months, it is the brisk in-passing favour-letter — exactly the sort of patronage-traffic that gives Cicero’s correspondence with Caelius its texture.