Cicero to C. Furnius, from Rome between 24 and 29 June 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae inter viii et iii K. Quint. a. 711 (43). This is the second of the two surviving letters from Cicero to Furnius (10.25 preceded it by a month), and the second-last letter of the Plancus dossier. By the time of writing, Plancus has been celebrated by the Senate, his $supplicationes$ are voted, his concord with Decimus Brutus is established, and the army of Narbonensis has been preserved from a costly engagement — the news that opens the letter.

The body of the letter, however, is a sharp rebuke. Furnius has written again about the praetor’s elections (the same subject as 10.25): if they fall in Sextilis he will come down quickly to stand; if they are already over, more quickly still “so as not to remain a fool any longer at the hazard of his life.” Cicero reads the line for what it is — a man at his post pretending to himself that it is the post that makes him foolish — and answers with a structured indignation that runs the length of section 2: exclamation, rhetorical questions in tricolon, the contemptuous flattening of the praetorship to “the cheapest and the most common” of magistracies if won at the run of common men. The closing offer in section 3 is Cicero at his most practical: “the elections, since you are hanging on them, we are pushing back into the month of January, so far as we can” — standing and circumstance both being served at once. “Win, then, and farewell” (vince igitur et vale) collapses the two valedictions, the political and the epistolary, into a single line.