Cicero at Rome to Gaius Julius Caesar in Spain — or, by the time the letter overtook him, on the road back from the Munda campaign — written at the very end of May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae ex. m. Mai. a. 709 (45)). The salutation CICERO CAESARI IMP. S. is the formula Cicero uses to Caesar in his imperator-capacity after Pharsalus and during the dictatorship. This is one of the small number of surviving private letters from Cicero to Caesar himself, and the only one of Familiares 13’s seventy-nine commendations addressed to him — which is part of what makes it so peculiar.

The ostensible business is brief: a recommendation of the younger Precilius, son of an old friend, on the standard courtesy-and-clientship terms. Around that nucleus Cicero builds an extraordinary frame of Homeric and Euripidean quotation, seven Greek tags in three sections — a density unmatched anywhere else in the Familiares. The line of thought runs: the boy’s father used to scold me for not joining your side; I refused (Iliad 9.587, Phoenix on Meleager); the great men kept urging me to glory (Odyssey 1.302, on being valorous for the sake of posterity); a black cloud of grief covered me (Iliad 17.591); but now I have moved on from Homer’s grandiloquence to Euripides’ realism, “I hate the wise man who is not wise on his own account.” The pose is self-mockery at the Pompeian choice, and a flattery of Caesar’s victory: the speaker has learned, late, the lesson Caesar’s friends had been trying to teach him. Cicero closes by drawing the reader’s attention to the device: genere novo sum litterarum ad te usus, ut intellegeres non vulgarem esse commendationem — “I have employed with you a novel kind of letter, that you might understand this is no ordinary recommendation.”

The piece is a delicate one. Cicero is a defeated Pompeian writing to the victor of the civil war, asking a personal favour, and folding into the request a half-apology for his own past resistance to that victory — carried, in Greek, at one remove from his own voice. The cluster of Homeric tags is unmistakably the literary virtuosity of an ageing consular displaying that he can still play the game; the Euripidean turn at the end carries an edge, since the “wise man who is not wise on his own behalf” may be Cicero himself in his Pompeian years, but may also stand at a glancing angle to the addressee. The metadata entry carries a year- precision placeholder of -0045-08-28; the Perseus dateline points to the end of May 45, which should be carried into the meta entry at the next consolidation pass.