Cicero to Appius Claudius Pulcher, written at Brundisium toward the end of May 51 BC, on the eve of the sea crossing to Cilicia. The Perseus dateline places the letter at the end of May; §1 fixes the day of Cicero’s arrival at Brundisium as the eleventh day before the Kalends of June (22 May), and the letter is plainly written within a few days of that arrival, while Cicero is waiting on his legate C. Pomptinus before sailing. This is the third piece in the studied handover correspondence between two men whom mutual reserve does not keep from doing necessary business: Cicero is succeeding the elder brother of his old enemy Clodius in a frontier province, and is at pains throughout to insist that the transition is between friends.

The substance is two pieces of business raised by Appius’s legate Fabius Vergilianus, who has come down to Brundisium with messages from his chief. First, the Senate’s view — shared, Cicero notes, by Appius and reported through Fabius before Cicero had thought of it — that reinforcements were needed for the Cilician command; the consul Servius Sulpicius blocked the levy, and the Senate’s overriding instruction was that Cicero and Bibulus should set out at once regardless. Second, the disposition of Appius’s existing troops: Appius had written to the Senate as though he were discharging soldiers wholesale, but Fabius reports that the discharges had not yet taken place when he left, and Cicero asks that they not now be carried through, since the legions are already thin. The tone throughout is the same careful courtesy as Ad Familiares 3.1 — the request is framed as confidence rather than complaint, and the closing line about waiting on Pomptinus before sailing is meant in part to give Appius time to receive the letter and respond before the new governor arrives.