Cicero to L. Papirius Paetus, written at Laodicea in Cilicia about the thirteenth of February 50 BC (Perseus: Scr.~Laudiceae post iii Id.~Febr.~a.~704). Though the letter stands in Book 9 — which is otherwise the cluster of genial notes to Paetus and Varro from 46 BC — it belongs four years earlier, to Cicero’s year as proconsul of Cilicia, when he held the title of imperator after his operations in the Amanus. The salutation accordingly reads Cicero Imp.~Paeto, not the bare Cicero Paeto of the later correspondence; the editors have grouped it with the rest of the Paetus letters by addressee rather than by date.

The two movements are sharply distinct. First the joke: Paetus, the cultivated stay-at-home Epicurean, has evidently sent his soldier-friend some military advice, and Cicero plays it back with mock gravity — the letter has made a “supreme commander” of him, he has been studying the treatises of Pyrrhus and of Cineas, he will keep light craft along the coast against the Parthian horse. “But why are we playing? You do not know what kind of general you are dealing with” — and the punch line is bookish, not martial: the general’s true campaign manual is Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the Paideia Kyrou, which he has read to tatters and now “unfolds entire” in his province. Then, with sed iocabimur alias, the tone turns and the real errand emerges: Cicero asks Paetus to intervene for his friend M.~Fadius, whose brother Q.~Fadius has put up for sale a jointly held estate at Herculaneum. Cicero wants Paetus to use his authority, counsel, and influence to keep the brothers out of disgraceful litigation against the enemies Mato and Pollio. The letter thus moves from the lightest banter to a pointed request for a favor, the characteristic register of the Paetus correspondence carried back into the Cilician year.