Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written from Rome at the end of July 54 BC. The recipient is the young legal expert whom Cicero had recommended to Caesar in early 54 (the famous Fam. 7.5, the recommendation letter, opens the Trebatius sequence). Trebatius had been on Caesar’s staff in Gaul through the spring and summer of 54, on his way (with Caesar’s army) to the second British expedition.

The letter is the third or fourth of the Fam. 7 sequence, all of which take their tone from the joke that runs through them: the urbane Roman man-of-letters lost in the camp. Trebatius is reported as having despised the “conveniences of the tribunate” — a military tribunate, on Caesar’s staff, which carried pay and standing without combat duty (“especially with the labour of soldiering taken away”). Caesar’s own report to Cicero — “not yet familiar enough on account of his occupations, but that you certainly will be” — is deflating.

The threats of §2 are mock-juristic: Vacerra and Manilius are jurists Cicero will go and complain to; Cornelius is C. Cornelius Maximus, Trebatius’s teacher (“you profess to have learned from him to be wise”), too weighty to be teased. The closing line — “I await your British letters” — is the running theme of the sequence: Cicero waits, with bemused attention, for the man-of-Roman-law to send back reports from beyond the world’s edge. Q. fr. 2.16 reports Trebatius getting to Britain; Fam. 7.10 (a year later) shows him back with Caesar in Gaul, better-tempered. Trebatius would survive to be one of the great jurists of the Augustan age and the dedicatee of Topica.