Cicero to Quintus Valerius Orca, legate with propraetorian power, written from Rome not before mid-October 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae non ante med. m. Oct. a. 709 (45)). The companion to Fam.\ 13.4: where the earlier letter pleaded for the people of Volaterrae as a body, this one pleads for a single Volaterran landholder, the senator C. Curtius, whose estate in Volaterran territory is among the parcels about to be parcelled out under Caesar’s veteran settlement.

The hook of the letter is a sharp little constitutional point. Curtius lost everything in the Sullan proscriptions, was restored along with the rest of that wronged generation (Cicero hints at his own role as adiutor incolumitatis), recovered a foothold in Volaterran soil, and has now just been raised by Caesar himself into the Senate. To divide up the very land that brings his census within the senatorial qualification would be both unjust in itself and incoherent on Caesar’s part: the dictator would be undoing with one hand what he has just done with the other. Cicero, as in 13.4, leaves the broader question to Caesar’s published will and asks Orca for personal forbearance — but ends, with characteristic verecundia, by withdrawing the legal argument in favour of pure personal weight: ne causa potius apud te valuisse videar quam gratia.