Cicero to M. Fadius Gallus, written from the Tusculan villa around 24 August 45 BC, a few days after 7.24 and continuing the same conversation. The torn-up letter Gallus had been distressed about is safe at Cicero’s house in town and can be retrieved at will. The rest of the section turns on the season’s open secret — the literary contest of Catones, in which Cicero himself, Brutus, Fadius Gallus, and others had each produced encomia of Cato Uticensis — and on the danger that hung over those encomia: Caesar, returning from Spain, was nearer than they had supposed. The proverbial Greek tag is rendered in transliteration: “a Sardonic laugh,” the bitter laugh of those whose joke goes wrong. Manum de tabula — “hand off the slate” — is the schoolmaster’s shout to the boy still scribbling; the schoolmaster here, of course, is Caesar, and Cicero pictures the “Cato-men” [Catoniani] being hoisted up for a flogging [in catomum].

The second section pivots from worry to delight in Gallus’s prose itself. The phrase cetera labuntur — “and as for the rest, it falls away” — is something Cicero wants kept utterly quiet, not even Gallus’s freedman Apella to be told: only the two of them write in that vein, and whatever the strain, “it is ours.” Cicero closes with the proverbial exhortation a finger’s-breadth (transversum unguem) never from the pen — the pen is the workman of speech — and the matter-of-fact note that he is by now claiming back some hours of the night for it himself. The Perseus dateline is circa ix K. Sept., i.e.\ about 24 August 45 BC.