Marcus Porcius Cato to Cicero at Tarsus, written from Rome in the last days of April or the first days of May 50 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae vel ex. m. Apr. vel in. Mai. a. 704 (50)). This is Cato’s answer to Cicero’s request, sent from Cilicia in Fam. 15.4, that Cato support a public thanksgiving for the Pindenissus campaign. Cicero had asked for two things at once: the supplicatio itself, the formal religious vote which (he hoped) would be the foretaste of a triumph, and a personal moral endorsement of the way he had governed his province. Cato gives him the second, in extravagant terms, and withholds the first.

The architecture is the meaning. Section 1 declares Cato’s own vote — a citation for integrity, defended province, preserved client-king, recovered allied goodwill — in language pitched as high as a Roman public testimonial can be pitched. Section 2 turns on a pair of conditional clauses, doubled in perfect balance: if you prefer that thanks be rendered to the gods rather than credited to your account, I am glad; but if you take the thanksgiving as the foretaste of a triumph and prefer that fortune be praised rather than yourself, then — and Cato then springs the trap — a thanksgiving does not always issue in a triumph, and what the Senate has already given you (a moral judgement that a province was held by mildness rather than by force) is a more illustrious thing than a triumph could be. The implication, courteous on its surface and pitiless underneath, is that to prefer the supplicatio to Cato’s testimonium is to prefer the lesser honour. Section 3 closes with the admission, made as if in apology for unusual length, that Cato has written this carefully precisely so that Cicero will reckon him to have wished what he himself judged most ample — and to rejoice, all the same, in what Cicero preferred. The Senate would in fact vote the supplicatio; Cato’s letter, with the elegance of its refusal, is the one Cicero kept.