Cicero to Appius Claudius Pulcher, proconsul of Cilicia, written at Rome around the middle of March 51 BC (Perseus: Romae circ. m. Mart. a. 703), as Cicero prepared to leave the city for the province Appius had been holding for the past two years. The lex Pompeia of 52 BC had imposed a five-year interval between magistracy and promagistracy, and the unwilling consular — who had spent his career steering clear of provincial commands — was caught in the new dispensation and sent out to Cilicia in Appius’s place. The handover was, by all reports of the months that followed, a disaster: Appius was draining the province and intended to draw out his stay; Cicero, once on the ground, would find decaying garrisons and an exhausted treasury. None of this can be said. The Pulchri are the most dangerous family in Rome, and Appius is brother to Publius Clodius; nothing the incoming proconsul writes can be allowed to look like complaint.

What he writes instead is the polished superficial cover that the situation requires. He casts himself as a reluctant successor, comforted only by the thought that no one is more Appius’s friend than he and that no one therefore would be more likely to receive the province in good order from him. The substantive request — the heart of the letter — is buried in two sentences of formula: that Appius, by every means in his power (and many will be in his power), look ahead and consult for Cicero’s interests; that, so far as he can, he hand over the province in the freest possible condition. The opener M. Cicero procos. s. d. Appio Pulchro imp. announces the formal symmetry of the transaction: two commanders, two titles, equal and courteous. The whole short letter is the careful first move in a correspondence whose two participants both know that the substance is going to be harder than the form.