Cicero to P. Volumnius Eutrapelus, written from Laodicea after the third day before the Ides of February (after 11 February) 50 BC, deep into the Cilician proconsulship (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Laudiceae post iii Id. Febr. a. 704 (50)). Volumnius carries the cognomen Eutrapelus — “the witty,” from the Greek eutrapelia — and was the city’s connoisseur of urbane talk; Cicero in this letter is asked to defend his own copyright over that domain.

The opening conceit is a small game. Volumnius has sent his letter without a forename, in friendly informality; Cicero affects to wonder whether it might not be from the senator Volumnius until the wit of the prose reveals the writer’s hand. From there the joke turns substantive: while Cicero has been out of Rome, every clever saying in the city — even Sestius’s — has been getting fathered on him. He casts Volumnius as his “agent” in possession of the “saltworks” (possessio salinarum), and asks him to put up a real defence: unless an ambiguity is keen, a hyperbole elegant, a wordplay neat, a turn against expectation amusing — in short, unless the techniques he had set out through Antonius in the second book of the De Oratore are visible — let Volumnius swear under oath that the joke is not his. The Greek terminology is deliberate: the technical vocabulary of comic theory recurs at every beat (akythēron, amphibolia, hyperbolē, paragramma, para prosdokian, entechna), the language of the schools deployed in mock-legal idiom.

The note about “our friend” in his tribunate is for Curio, whose year Cicero is following with hope; the closing request for Volumnius to encourage Dolabella is the early note of Cicero’s new son-in-law’s place in the household. The whole short letter is a specimen of the Ciceronian register the addressee was reputed for — playful, technical, and unmistakably his own.