M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written from Rome in June 51 BC (Perseus: Scr. Romae m. Iun. a. 703 (51)). The sensational headline is the acquittal of M. Valerius Messalla Rufus, consul of 53, on a charge of electoral bribery (ambitus) — a verdict so plainly bought, and so plainly out of step with public feeling, that Caelius is left literally speechless when it is announced. The jurors are shouted down on the spot; Hortensius, who had led the defence, walks into Curio’s wooden games-theatre the very next day and is hissed off the benches in a din the like of which his unmarred old age had never seen. Messalla, Caelius notes, still has a second indictment hanging over him under the Lex Licinia de sodaliciis (a Pompeian law against electioneering combines), and is now reckoned more likely to fall on the second prosecution than he was on the first.

The political shorthand of the second paragraph gathers up everything Cicero needs to track from his provincial post in Cilicia. The consul Marcellus has quieted down the offensive against Caesar’s Gallic command; the consular elections are entirely up in the air; Caelius himself is now standing for an aedileship (he uses designatum of his expected return) against M. Octavius and the obnoxious C. Hirrus, the cousin of Pompey whose name Cicero loathed. “On account of Hirrus,” as Caelius puts it dryly, Cicero will be especially attentive to the result. The closing requests show the friendship at work: the panthers Cicero is to capture and ship for Caelius’s aedilician games at Rome, and a bond on the freedman Sittius’s account, which Cicero is to honour. The commentarius rerum urbanarum — the rolling Roman newsletter that Caelius engaged a professional to compile, described in Fam. 8.1 — is now in regular instalments, the first sent by the courier Castrinius Paetus, the second by this letter’s bearer.