Cicero to T. Fadius Gallus, written from Rome around March 52 BC (the manuscripts: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, post m. Mart. a. 702). The salutation in the manuscripts reads only Gallo; some early editors, misled by the cognomen, supposed the addressee to be the Epicurean Volumnius Eutrapelus, but the content fixes the recipient as Cicero’s old quaestor T. Fadius Gallus, tribune of the plebs in 58 BC — one of the tribunes who had stood with Cicero against Clodius in the run-up to the exile. Fadius had since been convicted (we do not know on what charge) and was angling for restoration; he had evidently asked Cicero to use his influence, been refused, and now written an aggrieved letter accusing Cicero of cowardice and ingratitude. This is the reply.

The register is unique in the surviving book 7 — the playful, affectionate correspondence with Trebatius and the wits has nothing in it like this. The letter is short, sharp, and deliberately cutting. The opening lines reduce Fadius’s complaints to single points and dispatch each: he “attended dutifully” during the consulship (a small service over against Cicero’s claim that he, Cicero, is the reason the rest are free); Caesar will restore him (“no one believes you”); he sought the tribunate for Cicero’s sake (“I wish you were tribune still — you would not be looking about for a veto,” i.e.\ you would be the veto). The closing turn is the cruelest: if the reports you say you brought me about Clodius’s faction were false, I owe you nothing; if they were true, then you yourself are the best witness to what the Roman People owes me. The whole letter is a study in Cicero putting an ingrate in his place with no waste of words.