Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written from Rome late in December 54 BC. Trebatius is wintering with Caesar’s army in Gaul, having been placed on the general’s staff at the start of the year by Cicero’s recommendation (Fam. 7.5). The letter is one of the running pieces of the Trebatius sequence and is almost entirely jest: a congratulation on Caesar’s having discovered that the young man is a real jurist, a fretful note about the Gallic winter, and a parade of the standing in-jokes of the cycle — Britain (where gold and silver were rumoured and turned out not to exist), Trebatius’s refusal to swim in the Ocean, his refusal to watch the British essedarii or chariot-fighters, his old appetite back home for even the lowest of gladiator shows (the blindfolded andabatae). Mucius and Manilius are the great republican jurists Q. Mucius Scaevola and M’. Manilius, invoked here to sign off, deadpan, on the proposition that a cold lawyer should sit by the fire.

The third and fourth sections drop the joking and show why Cicero kept writing these letters at all. He has been prompting Caesar by post to advance Trebatius’s interests, and he now wants a report on what is working and what Trebatius intends. The closing flourish — one meeting between us, serious or jocular, would be worth more than not just our enemies but even our brothers the Aedui — is at Caesar’s expense: the Aedui were the Gallic tribe Rome had formally enrolled as fratres, brothers of the Roman people, and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico makes much of them. Cicero pretends to adopt the official idiom and at the same time to find his real brotherhood across the Alps with a lukewarm Trebatius rather than with anyone in the camp.