Cicero to T. Fadius, written from Rome around 20 March 52 BC (the manuscripts: Scr. Romae post med. m. Mart. a. 702). The recipient is T. Fadius, Cicero’s quaestor in 63 BC during his consulship and afterward tribune of the plebs in 57 BC, when he worked energetically for Cicero’s recall from exile. He has now himself been convicted in a court — on what charge the letter does not specify, though the language of “laws, courts, and times” and the single doubtful vote points to the wave of prosecutions that followed Pompey’s sole consulship in the wake of Clodius’ killing, when new laws on vis and ambitus were rapidly producing condemnations. The verdict has cost Fadius his place in the commonwealth; his property and his children remain.

The letter is short, and the consolation is political rather than philosophical. Cicero does not reach for the schools, as he had a few weeks earlier in Fam. 5.16 to Titius; here the argument runs the other way — the times are so ruinous that the man who has been removed from public life at the lightest penalty has been best served by his fate. The line plus tibi virtus tua dedit quam fortuna abstulit (“your virtue has given you more than fortune has taken away”) turns on the contrast between novus homo and nobilissimus: Fadius the new man has gained office — something most new men never reach — and has lost only what the greatest of the nobility have also lost. The closing pledge of unchanged goodwill toward Fadius and his children is the form a consolation took when there was nothing else to be said.