Cicero to L. Papirius Paetus, written at Rome around the prior intercalary month of 46 BC — Perseus: ut videtur, circ.~m.~intercal.~pr.~a.~708 (46). In Caesar’s calendar reform year, 46 had two intercalary months inserted between November and December to bring the civil year back into line with the seasons; “intercalaris prior” refers to the earlier of those, so the letter falls in late 46. Metadata note: the meta/works.yaml entry carries a year-precision placeholder of -0046-10-26; the true Perseus dating is the prior intercalary month of 46 BC, which falls after the ordinary calendar year’s end. The entry should be revised to year-or-month precision when the metadata is consolidated.

Three short sections, two registers braided together. The first is a small theory of letter-writing, dropped in answer to Paetus’s confession that he goes mad trying to imitate the “thunderbolts” (fulmina) of Cicero’s words — Cicero swats it back with self-deprecation: you would only be mad if you could not pull it off, and as it is you outdo me; you need not Trabea’s tag but only an apoteugma of mine, a “misfire.” He then articulates the principle plainly: a letter has nothing in common with a court-speech or a public address; even private suits are spun finer than capital cases. Letters, he says, cotidianis verbis texere solemus — we weave from everyday words. The second and third sections are an antiquarian set-piece: Paetus has claimed somewhere that no Papirius was ever anything but plebeian, and Cicero deluges him with patrician Papirii — Mugillanus the censor (in 312 a.u.c., when, he notes, “you used to be called Papisii”), the line down to L. Papirius Crassus and the dictator with Papirius Cursor as master of the horse, the Massones — and then with a parade of Carbones, each more disreputable than the last (prosecuted, exiled, suspected of poisoning Africanus, killed by Pompey at Lilybaeum, and a father acquitted only “by shoemaker’s blacking,” sutorio atramento absolutus, an idiom whose exact bite has been variously taken — either by suicide before verdict or by literal black ink), capped with the dry motion: ad patres censeo revertare — go back to the patricians; you see how the plebeians have been a graceless lot.