Cicero to L. Papirius Paetus, written at Rome at the beginning of the earlier intercalary month inserted by Caesar at the end of 46 BC — Perseus: Romae in.~interc.~priore a.~708 (46). Caesar’s calendar reform of 46 carried two intercalary months between the old November and December to bring the civil year back into step with the solar year, so the dateline locates the letter very near the true end of 46 BC, after the more substantial Paetus letters of the preceding summer (9.16, 9.17) and not long before the New Year letter 9.10 to Dolabella. Metadata note: the meta/works.yaml entry carries the year-precision placeholder -0046-04-20; the Perseus dateline locates the letter more precisely at the opening of the earlier intercalary month and so at the very close of 46 BC. The entry should be revised when the metadata is consolidated.

Five short sections in the established Paetus register, all appetite, wit, and political ruefulness. Cicero acknowledges two recent letters from Paetus, takes the occasion of a worry about Paetus’s health to praise him as the last living specimen of the old in-town Roman gaiety — a salt fresher and sharper than the Attic kind, and now smeared off Latium by an influx first of foreigners and then of bracatae et Transalpinae nationes, the trousered Transalpine tribes. He runs through the canonical witty Romans (Granius, Lucilius, the Crassi, the Laelii) and lands the joke as flattery. The second half turns rueful: Paetus had urged him not to retreat to a country house at Naples, citing Catulus as precedent; Cicero replies that the comparison fails, because in Catulus’s day the steersmen still sat on the stern, whereas now there is barely room left in the bilge. The Senate’s decrees, he adds, are now drafted in the house of one of Caesar’s intimates and reach the kings of Armenia and Syria over his name before he has heard the matter was even raised — and he has had thank-you letters from kings on the world’s edge whom he did not know had been so addressed, indeed whom he did not know had been born. So: while Caesar (noster praefectus moribus, our prefect of morals) remains in town, Cicero will behave; the moment Caesar leaves, he is for Paetus’s mushrooms. The closing lines turn practical — the Sullan house, the builders, the sumptuary-law allowance — and shade back into banter.