Trebonius to Cicero, from Athens on 25 May 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Athenis viii K. Iun. a. 710 (44). This is one of the rare letters in the collection from a correspondent: C. Trebonius, the consul-suffect of 45, now en route to govern Asia, writes back to Cicero from Athens just over two months after the Ides — in which he had played the (literally peripheral) part of detaining Antony outside the senate-house door while the others struck. He reports the one piece of news he knows Cicero most wants: young Marcus is in Athens, hard at work under the right teachers, and well-spoken of. The letter is unfussy and warm in the way only an old friendship licenses.

The body has three concerns. First, the report on the son (with a promise that, when Marcus visits the province, Cratippus the Peripatetic will be brought along so that the visit is not a “holiday from his studies”). Second, a literary gift composed at sea — a set of verses worked up around one of Cicero’s own dicta; Trebonius asks pardon if some of the lines are euthyrrh\=emonesteros, “a touch more outspoken,” invoking Lucilius as licence for satirical freedom. Third, a quiet but unmissable closing: when Cicero writes de interitu Caesaris, he must not leave Trebonius’s share of the deed — or of the friendship — out. The famous quaesivit lucem mortuo Antonius: Trebonius would be murdered at Smyrna by Dolabella in January 43, in what Cicero treats as the first blood of the new war.