M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written from Rome on the 2nd of September 51 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae iv Non. Sept. a. 703 (51)). The fullest Caelius newsletter so far, and the one in which the writer is plainly enjoying himself: he opens with the news he had hinted at in Fam 8.4 — Hirrus, beaten in the augural election, has been publicly and totally demolished — and gives himself the indulgence of a brief vignette of the loser’s afterlife (delivering anti-Caesar speeches in the chamber, taking up minor liberty-suits in the Forum “rarely after noon”). The conventional politics of Roman shaming are very visible: the defeated rival is no longer a man to take seriously.

The middle section returns to the public business of the August letters and reports a fresh deadlock: the consul-designate Marcellus has interrupted the Ides-of-August session on the provinces; the matter has been pushed to the Kalends of September, and even those have come and gone without progress, as a quorum could not be raised. Caelius now states, plainly and as his own settled view, that no successor will be sent to Cicero in his proconsular year, and that Cicero will have to leave behind a deputy — the prediction from Fam 8.5 hardening into a fact. The rest of the letter is the usual mixture of practical business and political colour: the panthers for the aedilician games, which Curio has now upstaged with a gift of ten plus ten African beasts; a commendation of one M. Feridius, a young Roman knight on business in Cilicia who wants the city-leased lands he holds exempted from tribute; the failure of M. Favonius, the noisy Catonian, to win the praetorship; and, most ominously, Pompey’s vox that no decree should be passed at present, counterposed to Scipio’s motion that the Gallic question be brought up on the Kalends of March 50, by itself, disjoined from all other provinces. That formula will shape the next year of senatorial business.