Cicero to M. Fadius Gallus, written from the Tusculan villa around 20 August 45 BC. The matter at hand is the singer Tigellius Sardus — one of Caesar’s intimates, lampooned later by Horace — whose ill-will toward Cicero, Gallus had been working (a touch fussily, in Cicero’s view) to repair. Cicero is having none of it. He cites Cipius, the legendary Roman husband who pretended to be asleep at the right moments: “I am not asleep for everyone”; just so, “I am not at every man’s service.” The pose recovered: in his consular pomp he was less besieged by suitors than he now is, in retirement, by Caesarians — Tigellius alone excepted, whom he will count as so much clear gain forgone, and whom he supposes Calvus Licinius (the iambic poet, in the manner of Hipponax) already has fully bought up in scurrilous verse.

The second section gives the specific grievance. Cicero had taken on the case of his friend Phamea, but the trial day Phamea proposed collided with the panel for P. Sestius; Cicero offered any other day Phamea liked. Phamea — relying, as Cicero notes acidly, on a grandson who was a passably good piper and a masseur of his own — went off in a huff. So much, Cicero says, for “Sardinians for sale, each worse than the next,” the proverbial tag (the slave-market joke about Sardus the captive having sired Sardinian Tigellius). The Perseus dateline is circa xiii K. Sept., i.e.\ about 20 August 45 BC. The letter closes by asking Gallus for his Cato — Gallus had written one of the encomia of Cato Uticensis that the year’s literary contest prompted — which Cicero “ought to be ashamed,” for both their sakes, not yet to have read.