Cicero to Appius Claudius Pulcher, written from camp by the river Pyramus in Cilicia in late June 50 BC (Perseus dateline: Scr. in castris ad Pyramum post Id. Iun. 704 (50)). The letter answers two of Appius’s at once, brought up from Tarsus by Q. Servilius: the earlier dated to the Nones of April, the later undated. Its principal occasion is the news of Appius’s acquittal on the maiestas charge that Dolabella had pressed against him in Rome. The prosecution was a piece of political theatre that Cicero suppresses an awkwardness about: Dolabella was at the same moment Tullia’s prospective husband, the engagement having been concluded in Cicero’s absence by his wife and daughter. The letter passes over this entirely. It is congratulatory, careful, and just a little stylised — the salute already addresses Appius as “censor, I hope,” anticipating the elevation that the acquittal had cleared the way for.

Section 2 contains a small and characteristic piece of Ciceronian forensic comment: maiestas, Cicero observes, is Sulla’s vague catch-all, where declamation against anyone is hard to bound; but ambitus — the alternative charge — is so plain a matter of fact that it must either be brought shamefully or defended. He pictures himself in court beside Appius, drawing peals of laughter against the prosecution he was not present to deride. The praise of Pompey and Brutus in section 3 is set carefully: of all kinsmen and friends, “the one the first man of every age and nation, the other long since the first of our young men and soon, as I hope, of our state.” The shadow of the gathering crisis is already on the sentence.

Section 4 turns to Appius’s second letter, which had sketched the political weather at Rome. Cicero reads it with relief: the dangers are lighter, the resources greater — “if, as you write, all the forces of the state have ranged themselves under Pompey’s command.” Section 5 closes with the private byplay of the correspondence: a complaint that one of Cicero’s earlier letters had been called “rather peevish” and not “eloquent,” answered with the joke that, as Aristarchus refuses to credit Homer with any line he does not approve, so anything unpolished must not be Cicero’s. The farewell looks forward to the censorship Cicero hopes Appius will hold; in fact the censors of 50 BC would be Appius himself and L. Calpurnius Piso.