Cicero to Gaius Trebonius, written from Rome probably late in 47 BC — the Perseus dateline reads Scr. Romae fort. ex. ann. 707 (47), fort.\ ex.\ ann.\ marking it as a conjectural late-year placement. Trebonius, who had served Cicero loyally as quaestor in 60 and broken with the tribune Clodius on his account, was now on the point of leaving Rome — the assignment to Spain glanced at in section 2 is the legateship under Caesar that would take him to the Further province. He had sent Cicero a volume gathering Cicero’s own witticisms together with a covering letter; Cicero’s reply combines warm acknowledgement of the gift with a careful defence of his earlier published assessment of the orator C. Licinius Calvus, who had recently died and whose letters to Cicero Trebonius had seen in circulation.

The letter is one of Cicero’s gentlest performances in the correspondence with Trebonius, and turns on the contrast between two kinds of writing: the private letter to Calvus, written “no more than this one which you are now reading, supposing it would ever go abroad,” and the book of bons mots Trebonius has compiled, which will. The defence of his praise of Calvus is candid: genuine respect for a real if limited talent, combined with the policy of praising in order to spur a young man on. The catalogue in section 2 of Trebonius’s services in 58 — the quaestor who took the consuls’ part against Clodius when his own senior colleague would not — is Cicero’s way of placing the present gift inside a long history of loyalty, and of registering the personal pang of yet another friend’s departure in a year when the circle of friends he could speak to freely had grown narrow.