M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written from Rome about the 10th of June 51 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae circ. iv Id. Iun. a. 703 (51)). The second of the Caelius newsletters: a fortnight or so after Fam 8.1, with Cicero now well on the road east, Caelius keeps the promise of regular dispatch and turns from the formal cover-letter idiom of the first into something looser and more characteristic — a short, gossipy run of paragraphs in his own voice, with the hired bulletin-compiler’s roll presumably travelling separately. The chief topic is the contest for the augurate, vacant since the death of Hortensius the previous year. Caelius is standing for it himself against Sextus Hirrus (C. Lucilius Hirrus, a Pompeian loyalist of cordially disliked personal qualities); M. Octavius is the other declared candidate. Cicero — absent on his way to Cilicia — is being held in reserve as the wittiest possible patron of Caelius’s campaign; his correspondent’s pleasure at the prospect of beating Hirrus, who had also been Cicero’s unsuccessful rival for the augurate, is undisguised.

The remaining business is editorial. The middle paragraph is the briefest possible reassurance that Cicero’s freedman Philotimus, charged with managing the property of the exiled Milo, is performing well and not damaging Cicero’s good name — a touchy file, since Philotimus’s competence was already in dispute. The closing paragraph is the most attractive moment in the letter: Caelius asks Cicero, in the otium of his provincial command, to write him some small treatise that will preserve their friendship in writing alongside De Re Publica and the rest of the monuments. The request is sincere and unfulfilled — no surviving work answers to it — but it confirms that Caelius, even at his most flippant, thinks of his old patron first as a producer of books for posterity.