Cicero to P. Cornelius Dolabella, written at Rome shortly before the third day before the kalends of January — Perseus: Romae ex.~a.~708 (46) paulo ante iii K. Ian., that is, the last days of December 46 BC, just before 30 December. Dolabella was at this juncture in Spain (or on the way), preparing with Caesar’s forces for what would become the Munda campaign of early 45. Dolabella had ceased to be Cicero’s son-in-law some time in 46 (he and Tullia divorced shortly before Tullia’s death the following February), yet the warmth between the two men is undiminished: the opening assurance te a me mirabiliter amari sets the tone for the whole letter.

The body is essentially three pieces of small talk calculated to amuse a friend on campaign: a comic account of Cicero’s sitting as judge in a trifling money matter between the grammarian Nicias and one Vidius, played out in the language of Alexandrian textual criticism (the two-line entry of the accounts is “obelized” by a “second Aristarchus,” and Cicero plays the antiquus criticus deciding whether the lines are the poet’s or interpolated); a momentary lapse from dignity in which Cicero recalls feasts at Nicias’s house, with a daggered textual crux (ingentium $$cularum$$) and a jest about the wisdom of the seventh hour; and at the close, the news of P. Sulla’s death and a sharp anxiety that hasta Caesaris refrixerit — that the auction-spear under which Caesar’s confiscated estates were sold off may have cooled, that is, that the political market for favours and properties is going off the boil. The Greek phrases obelizei, tou poiētou ē parembeblēmenoi, and sumbiōtēn are rendered in English with the transliteration preserved per the project convention.