Cicero to C. Iulius Caesar, imperator, written from Rome in April 54 BC. The recommendation of C. Trebatius Testa, the young jurist, to Caesar in Gaul — the founding letter of what becomes the Fam.\ 7 sequence on Trebatius’s years in the Gallic command. The letter is short and the register the formal recommendation that, between intimates, turns immediately into the affectionate fulsome.

The body has the famous coincidence of §2: while Cicero was discussing Trebatius with Balbus at his house, a letter from Caesar arrived containing what amounted to a request — “send me another whom I may dignify.” Both men raised their hands at the timeliness, “not chance, but divine.” Trebatius was therefore sent both on Cicero’s initiative and by Caesar’s own invitation.

The closing pledge — “no one is more upright, no one a better man, no one more modest” (in plain Roman fashion, not the old high-rhetorical phrase Caesar had teased him about in the Milo case) — and the technical compliment that Trebatius “leads the front rank in civil law with a singular memory and the highest knowledge” — mark the recommendation as a serious one. The Roman handshake idiom, de manu in manum, “from hand to hand,” completes it. The closing cura ut valeas et me ut amas ama is the soft closure of intimacy.

The whole sequence — this letter, then Fam. 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 7.10, 7.13, 7.14, 7.15, 7.16, 7.17, 7.18, running from April 54 BC into 53 BC — forms one of the sustained light-comedy strands of the correspondence: the urbane Roman jurist transposed into the camp on the edge of the world, the joke of the man-of-Roman-law hunted by British essedarii. Trebatius, against the joke, did distinguish himself; he survived to be one of the great jurists of the Augustan age, the dedicatee of the Topica.