Cicero to Appius Claudius Pulcher, proconsul of Cilicia, written at Rome late in the winter of 53 BC and placed first in book 3 of the Familiares, which collects the entire correspondence between the two men. Appius is the elder brother of Publius Clodius, the tribune who had driven Cicero into exile in 58 and continues to be the most dangerous of his enemies in the city; he is also the man whom Cicero is destined to succeed in Cilicia in 51, when the lex Pompeia of 52 will press the unwilling consular into a provincial command he has spent his career avoiding. The letter accordingly opens an exchange whose tone is among the most studied in the corpus: formal, polished, full of the courtesies that allow two men linked by deep mutual reserve to do necessary business without acknowledging what stands between them. The vehicle is a freedman, Phania, who is carrying the real news of affairs at Rome to Cilicia and to whom Cicero defers for the substance; he himself takes up only the rituals of goodwill.

The set-piece is the Minerva joke at the close of §1. Appius, like his line, had a familial cult of Minerva; Cicero, playing along, promises that if the Minerva by whose favour he means to repay Appius’s good offices turns out to be borrowed from Appius’s own household gods, he will call her not only Polias — the standard Athenian epithet, “of the city” — but Appias, a coinage in Appius’s honour. The whole letter is at this pitch. §2 dispatches the second freedman, Cilix, with the practised graciousness of a man turning a recommendation into the appearance of friendship; §3 commends the jurisconsult L. Valerius in a half-teasing formula. The Perseus dateline (Romae vel ex. a. 701 vel in. 702) places the letter on the cusp between late 53 and early 52; Shackleton Bailey settles on late February 53 BC. Two years later Cicero will be writing from Cilicia about the wreckage Appius left behind him, but here the tone is still that of the careful opening move.