Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written from Rome in late November 54 BC. Trebatius, the young jurist whom Cicero had pressed on Caesar for service in Gaul, has by this point spent a long and evidently unhappy season at the front: he missed Caesar’s brief expedition to Britain in the summer, and is now settled in winter quarters at Samarobriva (Amiens), Caesar’s Gallic headquarters. The letter is one of a long teasing sequence in Fam. 7 in which Cicero ribs his protégé for grumbling, for staying clear of Britain, and for failing to make his fortune as quickly as Balbus had promised he would.

The tone is the dry, lawyerly banter of two old Roman friends: a tag from the old tragedy Equus Troianus (“they grow wise too late”), a Greek word (philotheoros, “fond of sight-seeing”) dropped in to deflate the heroics of the British campaign, a Stoic paradox bent into a joke about Trebatius’s bank balance, and a closing thrust that grants him primacy as a jurist — but only in Samarobriva. Cn. Octavius, who appears in section 2, is a mutual acquaintance whose dinner invitations Cicero declines with mock-hauteur.