M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written from Rome before the end of February 50 BC (Perseus: Scr. Romae ante ex. m. Febr. a. 704 (50)). Cicero is in the last weeks of his year as proconsul of Cilicia; Appius Claudius Pulcher, his predecessor in the province and the man whose accounts he spent his governorship trying to disentangle, has just been indicted in Rome by P. Cornelius Dolabella — soon to be Cicero’s son-in-law — on charges of maiestas and ambitus. Caelius opens with the politics of the case: Appius has handled himself adroitly, scotching the worst of the ill-will by quietly dropping his pending triumph and walking into the city as a private citizen. He now looks to Cicero for support, and Caelius takes care to spell out the line Cicero must walk. He has no personal feud with Appius and can oblige him as he likes, but if he stands on the strict law he will look churlish about laying past enmity aside; the safe ground is to be generous, since no one will accuse him of having sacrificed duty to friendship. A pointed delicate note follows: between the demand for indictment and the formal naming, Dolabella’s wife (Fabia) has left him — the move that will shortly clear the way for his marriage to Tullia.

The remainder is a survey of Roman political weather. Pompey is working hard for Appius and may send one of his sons out to plead with Cicero in person. The juries are acquitting indiscriminately — “the wickerwork is foul through and through.” The consuls of 50, L.~Aemilius Paullus and C. Claudius Marcellus, are so cautious that the only senatorial decree they have managed to pass concerns the Latin Festival. Curio’s tribunate, on which the optimates had pinned their hopes against Caesar, is described first as “frozen solid” — and then, in a postscript, as suddenly red hot: angered by being denied his intercalary month, Curio has gone over to Caesar and is flinging out a road bill (compared, dismissively, with the notorious agrarian proposal of Rullus that Cicero crushed in 63) and a corn bill that bestows the dole-measuring on the aediles. The closing line returns to the running gag of the correspondence: Cicero, hunting Cilician beasts for Caelius’s upcoming aedilician games, must not let him down on the panthers.