Cicero to M. Marcellus, written at Rome in November — Perseus: Romae in m.~Nov.~a.~708 (46). The salutation in the manuscripts (CICERO MARCELLO S.) makes the sender Cicero and the recipient Marcellus, and the letter reads as a follow-up from Cicero rather than as Marcellus’s reply. By this point in the autumn the political ground has shifted: Caesar has granted the recall, in the scene preserved as the speech Pro Marcello, and Cicero is now writing in a register of cheerful impatience to ask why Marcellus is still not on the road.

The single section is short and intimate. The slight, half-rueful suspicion ne te delectet tarda decessio — “that this slow departure of yours is taking on a charm of its own” — has the temperament of a man who knows his correspondent. Theophilus the freedman, who had carried 4.9 east to Mytilene in August, is now setting out east again from Rome; the letter is the courier-note that goes with him. The two substantive arguments of the August letters reappear in compressed form — that what is heard is hardly lighter than what is seen, and that the household estate needs its master — and then the letter closes on the practical question: by what date are we to expect you?