Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written on 8 April 53 BC from a friend’s villa in the Pomptine marshes south of Rome, where Cicero had broken his journey. Trebatius, the young jurist whom Cicero had pressed upon Caesar, was still on the Gallic staff. The letter opens with brisk encouragement — Trebatius is at last bearing camp life like a man — and a teasing promise to “renew the recommendation, but at the right moment.” Because the legal guarantees Trebatius can give from Gaul are worthless at this distance, Cicero says he is enclosing a little Greek IOU in his own hand: a joke on the fashion among Roman lawyers for cautiones dressed up in Greek formulas. He then asks for real news of the Gallic war, professing his usual rule that the bigger the coward, the more reliable his battle-reports.

The middle section turns to Trebatius’s recent letters themselves: why send several copies of the same letter in your own hand, and why scrape down a palimpsest to do it? Cicero spins a small comic essay out of the question — either Trebatius is wiping out his own legal forms, or he is so unoccupied that he cannot even get hold of paper, in which case it is his own fault for leaving his Roman modesty behind. The closing paragraph descends from joke to particulars: Cicero will commend Trebatius to Balbus when Balbus next goes north; he is on the road for April, so the post will be irregular; and at Ulubrae a multitude of frogs has croaked in honour of their new patron — a passing dig at the desolate little Pomptine town and its electorate. A postscript notes that he has torn up an earlier letter from Trebatius, harmless in itself, on the writer’s own instructions.