Cicero to his brother Quintus, dictated — not written in his own hand, on account of an eye inflammation — from Rome on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of February (19 January) 56 BC. Quintus is now in Sardinia, where Pompey sent him as legate after the second consulship of 55 BC was already in view. The letter braids the brothers’ running domestic correspondence (Numisius’s villa design, the debts owed to Atticus’s brother Pomponius, the Tusculan property at Culleo’s auction, the building work at Rome and pressing the contractor Cyrus) with the political dispatch. The political half of the letter (§3) is the Quintus-version of the Egyptian-question report Cicero is also sending to Lentulus that same week (Fam. 1.1–1.4): the Senate decree that the king must not be brought back “with a multitude” (the Sibyl-induced no-army condition), the calumnies that have stalled the Lentulus-vs-Pompey contention, the comitial days that close the Senate, and the suspicion that the tribune Caninius will carry the bill (transferring the commission to Pompey) by violence. Cicero’s gauge of Pompey is the same as in Fam. 1.2 — the man himself opaque, his entourage transparent. The xiv K. Feb. dating both opens and closes the letter. The augury anecdote of §1 is the elder Gracchus in 162 BC, who while governing Sardinia recalled having held his own consular elections against the auspices and reported the irregularity to the Senate.