Quintus Cicero to his brother Marcus, written from Transalpine Gaul — where Quintus was serving as a legate under Caesar — at the end of May 53 BC. The letter is one of the very few in the Ciceronian corpus by a hand other than Marcus’s, and it preserves Quintus’s voice clearly: warmer and less guarded than his brother’s, given to exclamations and oaths, and grateful in a way that does not stop to weigh its phrases. The occasion is Tiro’s manumission, which Marcus has just carried out and reported in two letters — one in his own hand, one in Tiro’s — both of which Quintus has read straight through.

The first section opens with the family oath formula ita te \ videam, ut — “so may I look upon you, and my Cicero, and my Tulliola, and your son” — one of the strongest in the household register, calling the children of the family as witnesses. Quintus’s reflex is comparative: his own loyal slave Statius is already a great pleasure to him, and yet Tiro brings on top of that gift the literary collaboration and the humanitas that Statius does not. The closing line about promising things to Sabinus’s boys is one of the small puzzles of book 16: most likely the slave-couriers who carried Marcus’s news up into Gaul, whom Quintus has just paid off and means to reward further.