Cicero (still in his Cilician province, writing from Tarsus) to C. Claudius Marcellus, consul of 50 BC. The Perseus dateline assigns the letter to “the same place and time” as Fam. 15.6 — i.e. roughly August 50, in the closing weeks of Cicero’s governorship. Marcellus had taken a leading role in pressing the Senate to decree a supplicatio (a public thanksgiving) for Cicero’s modest military operations on Mount Amanus, against considerable resistance from those who thought the honour disproportionate to the campaign. This short note is his thank-you. The tone is warm but stylized: the debt Cicero owes the Claudii Marcelli as a family is already an old one, and what Marcellus has just done as consul renews and intensifies it.

The letter is also a quiet pre-announcement. Cicero closes by hoping that the voyage home — now running squarely into the Etesian winds that blow against any westbound sail in late summer — will not hold him too long, and that he will see Marcellus “before long.” The text in section 1 is corrupt at one point (Mendelssohn and Shackleton Bailey both obelize the phrase that closes the section); the translation supplies a plausible filling in brackets.