Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written from Rome in mid-September 54 BC. Trebatius is still with Caesar’s army in Gaul, where Cicero had placed him on the staff at the start of the year (the recommendation is Fam. 7.5). The luctum that keeps Cicero from writing to Caesar directly is the death of Caesar’s daughter Julia — Pompey’s wife and the last familial hinge between the two men — who died in childbirth in late August or early September. Cicero routes his solicitude for Trebatius through Balbus instead.

The letter is among the shortest in the corpus and runs on the dry register of the whole Trebatius sequence. The middle section — tu tibi desse noli; serius potius ad nos, dum plenior — presses the running joke that Trebatius should not flee Gaul empty-handed, however little he is enjoying the camp; “especially now that Battara is dead” is private shorthand, some Roman rival or distraction no longer giving Trebatius any reason to hurry home. The closing vignette is pure social comedy: a man whose name Cicero affects not to be able to remember — “a certain Cn. Octavius, or is it Cn. Cornelius?” — and whom he characterises in a single self-cancelling phrase (summo genere natus, terrae filius, “born of the highest family, a son of the earth” — the second tag is the standard Latin idiom for a nobody) keeps inviting him to dinner on the strength of knowing Trebatius. Cicero never goes, but enjoys the compliment.