Cicero to Trebatius, written from the Cuman or Pompeian villa in May 54 BC. The third letter of the Trebatius sequence after the recommendation to Caesar (Fam. 7.5, April 54) and the parallel commendation to Quintus (implicit in Q. fr. 2.12, May 54). Trebatius is now with Caesar’s army, on the way to or in Britain, and is homesick.

The body is a sustained literary play with Ennius’s Medea, the Roman tragedy adapted from Euripides. The silly notions and longings for the city are to be set aside and the campaign endured: we your friends will excuse you, as the Corinthian matrons excused Medea, who, “with hands most thoroughly whitened with chalk” (a touch of female ritual — the chalked palms of formal courtesy), persuaded them not to think the worse of her for being away from her country. The two verse quotations from Ennius are the load: “the wealthy matrons, the gentlewomen, that held Corinth’s high citadel” (the matrons addressed in Medea’s defence) and the apothegm “many have managed both their own affair, and the commonwealth, well, far from the fatherland; many, who would spend their life at home, on that very account have been disapproved.”

The closing line returns to the same play, with the double tag of Roman home wisdom: “take care that in Britain you are not tricked by the chariot-fighters” — the British essedarii, the war-chariot drivers Caesar’s De Bello Gallico would describe; and Ennius again, “he who, being wise, cannot help his own self, is wise to no purpose.” The combination is typical Ciceronian urbanitas: the educated joke at Trebatius’s expense that takes its weight from the great old tragic poet Trebatius would have read with him.