Cicero to Q. Caecilius Metellus Nepos, consul, written from Dyrrachium around April 57 BC. Metellus Nepos was the younger brother of the Metellus Celer to whom Cicero had written Fam. 5.2 in 62 BC — and the man whose tribunician obstruction in December 63, when Cicero stepped down from the consulship, had begun the long quarrel. Metellus had now (as consul of 57) made an unexpectedly conciliatory speech in the Senate, which Quintus has written out and sent on. The letter answers it: a careful, public-facing appeal in which Cicero asks Metellus, for the consulship’s sake, to keep his own people in line and not let private enmities of his clan be turned against the commonwealth. The closing warning is the most pointed line in the surviving exile letters to a political peer: “take care, when you wish to call back the time of saving everyone, lest, with no man left to be saved, you cannot.”