Cicero to Q.~Lepta, his longtime praefectus fabrum and trusted administrative friend, written at Rome at the end of January 45 BC (Perseus: Romae ex.~m.~Ian.~a.~709 (45)). The letter is a small bundle of practical reassurances. A Caesarian municipal statute (the lex Iulia municipalis) had recently barred working praecones — auctioneers — from sitting on town councils, and Lepta had written in alarm on behalf of friends back home. Cicero has put the question, by note, to Balbus; the answer is the narrow one the friends needed — the bar applies only to those currently practising, not to those who once did — and Cicero relays it with a tart aside on the standards of the new Senate, where practising haruspices were being enrolled while former auctioneers were being shut out of decurial benches in small towns.

The rest of the letter is the mixed cargo of a friendly note. From the Spanish war Cicero passes on the only intelligence he has: a Caesarian letter making Sex.~Pompeius’s strength out at eleven legions, and an ugly story of an attempted Caesarian defection put down by execution in the camp. He promises to keep working on Lepta’s suretyship for Pompeius once Galba is back in town, thanks Lepta for his warm reception of the freshly published Orator, fusses fondly over Lepta’s small son (also called Lepta) and his Hesiod, and explains his own movements: Tullia’s recent childbirth and the slow extraction of her dowry-instalment from Dolabella’s agents are keeping him in the city, and in any case his villas and his reading content him as they did not used to. The Greek tag at the close — τῆς δ’ ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα, “but in front of excellence [the gods set sweat]” — is from Works and Days 289.