Ad Familiares 5.10b

Publius Vatinius to Cicero, a very brief dispatch sent from his Adriatic camp at Narona on the Nones of December 45 BC. Dated by the subscriptio (D. N. Decembr., Narona) and placed in the Latin Library’s text as letter X.b of the fifth book of the Familiares. Coming six months after Vatinius’s long appeal of July (5.9), and before the longer letter of early 44 (our 5.10a), this is a short field-report: the supplicatio Caesar withheld in the summer has now been voted, and Vatinius, marching back into Dalmatia, has taken six towns by storm, one of them four times over — four towers and four walls of the citadel, before snow, cold and rain drove him off. He asks Cicero, his patron and former defender, to plead his case with Caesar should one further nudge be needed, and closes with the warm formula neminem te tui amantiorem habere (“you have no one who loves you more than yourself”, that is, “no one loves you more than I do”). The compactness of the letter — a single Latin paragraph — is one of the reasons the older numbering treated it as a postscript to 5.10a; the modern editorial tradition (Shackleton Bailey, Tyrrell–Purser) prints them as two distinct letters, in which order this edition follows.