Cicero to Publius Sestius, his old friend and the quaestor (now proquaestor) of his consular colleague C. Antonius, written at Rome around the Ides (13th) of December 62 BC. Three pieces of news. First, Cicero has worked the senate to keep Sestius (and Antonius) in post in Macedonia for another year: the relevant motion has been postponed to January and was, Cicero says, easy to hold. Second, the famous house: Cicero has bought Crassus’s house on the Palatine for HS 3,500,000 (about the sum that would have bought a small city’s worth of land), the price of his entry into the political class of Rome. The famous half-joke follows — “so much debt that I should be glad to enter into a conspiracy if anyone would receive me; but the wicked hate the avenger of conspiracy, and the others do not think a man who rescued the financiers from a siege could be short of money” — the consul’s purchasing power as the new-man property. Third, Sestius’s own house at Rome looks well in progress; and Cicero has defended Antonius (now struggling in Macedonia, soon to be prosecuted) in the senate “most gravely and diligently.”