Cicero to C. Claudius Marcellus, consul-elect for the following year, written on the road through Lycaonia between the kalends of September and the 12th day before the kalends of October 51 BC — so, around the 21st of September. The manuscript dateline (Scr. in itinere per Lycaoniam inter K. Sept. et xi K. Oct. a. 703) places it in the same week as the senate dispatch of 15.1; Cicero is on the march toward the Taurus when he hears that the elections at Rome have made Marcellus consul for 50 BC.

The note is a courtesy congratulation, brief and warm, with the standard request for a senior friend’s continuing patronage — “hold the absent in affection and defend him.” The triangulated flattery — through Marcellus’s father, his distinguished mother, and the obligations Cicero already owes the family — is conventional in this genre, but the line about the mother (Junia, daughter of Junius Silanus; her zeal for Cicero’s salus during his exile in 58 BC is what is recalled) is unusually warm, going out of its way to notice the kind of public service that women of the nobility were not usually credited for. Cicero will write again to Marcellus over the coming months; the relationship will matter when Cicero’s own request for a supplication is voted on in 50 BC.