Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa in Gaul, written from Rome about mid-July 53 BC. The occasion is a verbal message: Chrysippus Vettius, the freedman of Cyrus — Cicero’s late architect, who had built or remodelled several of his houses — has carried oral greetings from Trebatius, but no letter. Cicero turns the absence into the joke of the piece: Trebatius has grown too grand to put pen to paper for “a man practically of his own household,” and the loss to litigation is real — “the fewer suitors will be losing their cases with you as their counsel.” The threat to come out and visit before dropping out of memory altogether, and the renewed dig at Trebatius’s evasion of the summer campaigning (“contrive something, as you did over Britain”), keep the familiar Trebatius register: affectionate teasing of the young jurist who has talked himself onto Caesar’s staff and is busily talking himself off the front line.

The second paragraph closes with the running pun on the two kinds of ius. Trebatius has been reported on familiar terms with Caesar — excellent news — but Cicero would rather hear it from Trebatius himself; that, he says, is what would happen if his friend had ever bothered to master the law of friendship instead of the law of lawsuits. The sign-off (“we have been jesting in your way, and not a little in our own”) acknowledges the manner of the whole piece, and the warmth that closes it is unforced: Cicero is fond of this correspondent, and lets the wit drop for the last sentence.