M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written from Rome on the Kalends of August 51 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae K. Sext. a. 703 (51)). The third Caelius newsletter, and the first that really earns the description Cicero set it: a future-leaning political bulletin from the sharpest eye in town. The opening catalogue is a Roman summer in five clauses — Messala acquitted (of ambitus, then condemned by a second court on a parallel charge), the conservative C. Claudius Marcellus elected consul for 50, M. Calidius indicted, P. Dolabella made a quindecimvir sacris faciundis; and as the centrepiece, the loss of Lentulus Crus’s bid for the same priestly college, which Caelius savours with undisguised schadenfreude. The third paragraph reaches the news this volume was made for: the entry of the younger C. Scribonius Curio — son of the elder Curio whose death was the heart of Fam 8.2 — as a candidate for the vacant tribunate, and the early signs that he is leaning towards the Senate rather than Caesar. Caelius’s diagnosis (Caesar has miscalculated by treating Curio with contempt; the elegance of the unintended manoeuvre amuses everyone) will be embarrassed by the events of the next year, when Curio’s tribunate becomes one of Caesar’s principal instruments.

The political heart of the letter is the fourth section: the senatorial debate of 22 July on Pompey’s pay, which forced Pompey to declare publicly that he would withdraw from Gaul the legion he had lent to Caesar, and brought the question of the succession to Caesar’s provinces openly into the chamber for the first time. The Senate has tabled the substantive vote until Pompey’s return, and Caelius is bracing for the session of the Ides of August. The Pompey vox he records — “all must obey the Senate’s word” — will read very differently nine months on. The closing paragraph drops back into the domestic register: the Sittian bond (a debt Caelius is trying to recover from the African operator P. Sittius, on which he wants Cicero’s pressure as governor); the famous request for Cibyran panthers for his aedilician games; and a query about the political consequences of the death of Ptolemy XII Auletes of Egypt, news of which is just reaching Rome.