Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa in Gaul, written from Rome in June 53 BC. (The manuscript order of the seventh book of the Familiares places this letter after 7.14, but the dateline puts it about a month earlier — Tyrrell and Purser, following the Loeb sequence, retain the manuscript position.) The letter is brief and uncharacteristically tender. Trebatius has at last written that he is enjoying himself in Gaul; Cicero, who has spent the preceding letters of the series scolding him for homesickness, now finds himself stung by the opposite fact. The opening sentence is the whole joke: “how peevish a thing it is to be in love can be gathered from this alone.” The mood is banter still, but the affection beneath it is plain.

The substance lies in the second paragraph: Trebatius has formed a close friendship with C. Matius, the cultivated Roman knight who appears repeatedly in Cicero’s correspondence as a man of charm and learning, and who would later be the recipient of Cicero’s defence of his own conduct after Caesar’s murder (Fam. 11.27–28). Cicero’s emphasis on the acquisition is sincere: of all the things Trebatius might bring home from Gaul — gold from Britain, a cohort of essedarii, a fat purse from Caesar — a Matius is by far the most precious. The closing cura ut valeas is the formula of intimate correspondence.