Cicero — already proconsul, en route through Lycaonia toward his Cilician province in late September 51 BC — to L. Aemilius Paullus, who has just been elected consul for 50. The Perseus dateline groups the letter with Fam. 15.7, 15.8 and 15.9, all written on the same stage of the eastward journey. The first half is a graceful note of congratulation on Paullus’s election, conventional in shape but warm in tone: Cicero had never doubted the outcome, given Paullus’s services to the commonwealth and the standing of the Aemilian house, but the news still produced “incredible joy.”

The second half is the practical request that runs through almost every letter of this period to men of influence: Cicero wants his term in Cilicia to be exactly one year and no longer. He had accepted the province reluctantly, under the Pompeian law of 52, and his terror is that he will be held there beyond his appointed year through some neglect at Rome. He asks Paullus, on the strength of the older man’s zeal for him, to see that no injustice is done and that nothing be added to his annual commission — a refrain that will become the keynote of his Cilician correspondence with the consuls of 50.