Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa in Gaul, written from Rome on 4 March 53 BC. Trebatius has evidently complained that Cicero’s correspondence had lapsed and has read the silence as pique; Cicero answers that the lapse was practical (he did not know where his friend was), then turns the complaint back on its author. The little flight of mock indignation in the first paragraph — “which is it that makes you so haughty, your purse, or that the imperator consults you?” — belongs to the running joke of the Trebatius series: Cicero pretending to take umbrage at the airs his young protégé has acquired on Caesar’s staff, and playing on the double sense of consuli, “to be consulted” as a jurist and “to be looked after” as a friend, with the extra pun on inaurari, “to be gilded.”

The second paragraph is sustained legal joking. In Gaul, Cicero says, property is not claimed by the formal civil procedure of manum consertum — the symbolic laying-on of hands at the disputed object — but by the sword; and the standard interdict against forcible entry, with its exception “provided that you have not been the first to come with armed men and force,” is no protection where the disputants are barbarians. The closing pun is on the Treveri tribe (whose territory lay near Caesar’s winter quarters) and on the old legal tag aere, argento, auro, “of bronze, silver, and gold,” from the formulae about coined metal: the Treveri, he is told, are capital fellows — meaning both deadly and, in legal parlance, liable to the capital sentence — but he would rather they were the harmless kind associated with the formula. The lawyerly wit is the whole point of the letter, and the matter-of-fact dating subscription D. IIII non. Mart. is preserved as Cicero wrote it.