Publius Vatinius to Cicero, written early in 44 BC from his Illyrian command (Latin Library: in Illyria ineunte a.~709; for the Caesar of the letter, this is the dictator’s last winter). The letter is incoming, not outgoing, and follows on directly from the patron-client business opened in Ad Fam.~5.9 (July 45 BC) and 5.11 (sent on afterwards). Vatinius reports on three things Cicero has put on his desk from Rome: a missing reader (Dionysius) who has run off, a defence Cicero wants him to forgo against one Catilius, and the supplicatio Caesar has so far refused to vote him for the Dalmatian campaign. The Catilius half is the centre of the letter — Vatinius pulls back, rhetorically, at the idea of sparing a man he calls “a monkey, not even a man” (simius, non semissis homo), who has slaughtered Roman citizens, sacked towns, and taken arms against him on the Adriatic. He yields the request, as a favour to his patron, but with a small flare of military pride: had he the front of his predecessor Appius Claudius Pulcher (governor of Illyricum 57–56 BC), he could not look the victims in the face. The pique against Caesar at the end — “as if I had not earned the most lawful triumph in Dalmatia!” — is candid: he names twenty old Dalmatian towns and sixty newer ones still to take, and asks whether the standard for a supplicatio has suddenly tightened only for him. Two months later Caesar will be dead, and the question of Vatinius’s triumph will pass to the Senate his patron is busy reorganising.