Cicero to M. Marius, written at Rome around the Ides of February 51 BC (Perseus: Romae circ. id. m. Febr. 703). Marius — the cultivated invalid friend of Cicero’s Campanian neighbourhood, addressee of the great theatrical- review letter Fam. 7.1 of the year before — has sent two requests across the bay: a commission to handle a piece of inherited property at Rome, and a half-apologetic note of congratulation on the recent conviction of T. Munatius Plancus Bursa. The two halves of the letter are pitched in different registers but in the same intimate voice. The opening is light, mock-mercantile teasing: Marius has, as it happens, picked for the job the one man with an interest in the property going for as much as possible (Cicero is himself a co-heir), but his ceiling-price will protect him, and Cicero, foiled in his mock-conspiracy, will plant a fictitious bidder rather than let the thing go for less.

The second movement is the real news. Bursa — one of the tribunes of 52 who had inflamed the mob against Cicero’s client Milo after the killing of Clodius — had just been convicted under the lex Pompeia on public violence, with Cicero prosecuting and Pompey, the very man whose law it was, exerting himself for the defence. The verdict was a personal vindication on a scale rare in Cicero’s later career, and his pleasure in it is open. He distinguishes it from any merely vengeful satisfaction: he prefers a judgment to a sword, a friend’s glory to an enemy’s ruin, and he was struck above all by the ranks of good men who stood with him against the incredible exertion of Pompey. And then, with one of his hard private confessions, he says he hated Bursa worse than Clodius himself — Clodius at least had a public motive and acted with men who needed Cicero down; this one was a simiolus, a “little ape,” attacking him for his own amusement at the prompting of Cicero’s lesser enviers. The close is the quiet preoccupation that will shape all his correspondence of these months: he is about to leave for Cilicia under the lex Pompeia of 52, and prays daily that no intercalary month be inserted, so that he may see Marius again before the long absence begins.