Cicero in Rome to Publius Vatinius, imperator on campaign in Illyricum, written at the end of October 45 BC (Perseus: Romae ex.~m.~Oct.~a.~709 (45)). The letter is one half of the surviving two-way correspondence with Vatinius preserved in book 5 of the Ad Familiares; the incoming letters from Vatinius’s camp at Narona stand alongside it (5.9, 5.10) and put Cicero’s replies in unusual relief. The pair were once political enemies — Vatinius the Caesarian tribune of 59 BC, the target of In Vatinium — but since Cicero’s reluctant defence of him in 54 BC at Caesar’s behest the relationship has run, on both sides, on the warm courtesies of a settled patron-client friendship.

The letter answers three requests evidently made in Vatinius’s previous despatch. First (§1), Cicero accepts Vatinius’s thanks for the favour done him in Rome and assures him of the same readiness in everything else. Second (§2), he takes up the commendation of Vatinius’s wife Pompeia: he has already spoken to Sura on her behalf, will see to whatever she needs in person if required, and asks Vatinius to instruct her to treat nothing as too trivial. Third (§3), he is brisk about Dionysius — presumably a fugitive slave or freedman Vatinius is hunting — with the jocular promise that any scoundrel will be led captive in Vatinius’s triumph, and closes with the soldier’s curse on the Dalmatians and the assurance, echoed back from Vatinius’s own dispatch, that they will be taken and will lend lustre to his res gestae. The register throughout is the easy, slightly comic warmth that Cicero reserves for old enemies turned friends, with the promise of a supplicatio and an eventual triumph in the air on both sides.