M. Caelius Rufus to Cicero, written around the seventh day before the Ides of March (about 9 March) 49 BC (manuscript dateline Scr. circ. vii Id. Mart. a. 705 (49)). The shortest of Caelius’s surviving newsletters of this year and the first sent after he had gone over to Caesar. The place of writing is not given in the dateline — the circ. is a hedge on the date (“written around”), not a location. The works register has carried the abbreviation into the location-written slot in error; the letter was very likely composed somewhere on the march in north Italy as Caesar’s column moved toward Brundisium and the Spanish campaign.

The voice is unmistakably Caelius’s: gossipy, quick, half-mocking, half-anxious. Section 1 opens with the rhetorical contrast of the two principals — Pompey ineffectual, Caesar keen and temperate — and the gibe that Caesar’s troops, who walked a war shut by mere ambulation through the worst of winter, were not exactly feeding on apples. Then the mood drops: “if you knew how anxious I am, you would laugh at this glory of mine, which has nothing to do with me.” Section 2 turns to the immediate trouble — a local affair at Intimilium on the Ligurian coast, where a slave-officer named Bellienus took money to murder a guest-friend of Caesar’s named Domitius, and the town has gone to arms in protest. Caelius is being sent over the Alpine snows to put it down. He closes with a Roman witticism on the two Domitii: the one “sprung from Venus” is Caesar (Iulus, Aeneas, Venus); “your Domitius” is L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, whom Caesar had pardoned at Corfinium; the one born of Psecas (a slave-woman’s son) is Bellienus, who at least had the spirit to dispatch his Domitius. The wit covers a complaint: Caesar’s clemency at Corfinium has already begun to look, to Caelius, like political weakness.