M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written from Rome around the 24th of May 51 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae ix K. Iun. aut paulo post a. 703 (51)). This is the opening letter of the famous run of Caelius’s dispatches from Rome to Cicero during his year in the province of Cilicia — the seventeen-letter Ad Familiares book 8, the most concentrated Roman-newsletter material in the surviving correspondence and one of the two best windows we have onto the political weather of 51–50 BC (the other being Cicero’s own letters to Atticus from the same period). Caelius was Cicero’s old protégé and forensic client — defended by Cicero in 55 BC in the Pro Caelio — and is now a tribune-elect, a rising figure in the political middle, poised between the optimates and Caesar.

The arrangement set out here is, in effect, a contract: Cicero, going east, has asked Caelius for a running report on Roman affairs; Caelius, busy and self-confessedly slack about letter-writing, has hired a professional newsletter-compiler — one of those Roman operarii who produced manuscript bulletins of senatorial business, edicts, court reports, and city gossip — and is forwarding the bound roll, with his own commentary letter on top. He apologises for the arrangement, with characteristic dry self-mockery, and then in three short paragraphs gives the editorial context: nothing momentous brewing; Marcellus has postponed the motion on Caesar’s Gallic command to the Kalends of June; rumours of disaster in Gaul are circulating in the inner ring of senators but not in the streets; a Roman urban-legend version of Cicero’s own death has gone about, and Caelius brushes it aside with a joke about Q. Pompeius and his bath-house at Baulis. The final line — “your books on politics are the rage everywhere” — refers to the De Re Publica, just out, and is the only first-hand evidence of its reception in the city.