Cicero to M. Marius, at his villa near Pompeii, written from the Cumaean estate. The Perseus dateline gives in Cumano m. intercal. post a. 708 (46) — the second intercalary month inserted into Caesar’s calendar reform of 46 — indicating a date in the autumn. The salutation is to M. Mario, not to C. Trebatius Testa (the principal correspondent of Book 7); the launch metadata’s recipient line was therefore inaccurate.

The note is a one-paragraph travel announcement to a neighbour. Cicero has just arrived at Cumae with Scribonius Libo and is moving on to his other Campanian villa near Pompeii in a day or two. The closing joke about Marius’s gout — “if you have any engagement set with your gout, see to it that you put it off for another day” — is the characteristic register of the Marius correspondence (cf. Fam. 7.1), in which Cicero treats Marius’s chronic complaint as a fellow guest with its own diary, to be politely asked to step aside when better company is in town.