Marcus to Quintus, written at Rome a few days after the Ides of May 56 BC. Quintus is in Sardinia on Pompey’s grain commission; Cicero is back from the Antium retreat where the Att. 4.4A–4.8 cluster was written, and the political weather has shifted in his favour twice over.

The first piece of news is the Senate’s refusal of a supplicatio for the consul of 58 — Aulus Gabinius, Cicero’s old enemy — on his Judaean campaign as governor of Syria. The denial of a thanksgiving to a returning general was all but unprecedented (Procilius adiurat hoc nemini accidisse), and applauded outside the curia. Cicero’s relish is sharpened by his being away when the vote came: “it is a clean verdict [Greek: eilikrines], without my fighting and without my favour.”

The second piece is the matter that lies under his silence: the ager Campanus, the Campanian public land distributed under Caesar’s consular law of 59. The agenda for the Ides and the day after had marked it for debate; the debate did not happen. Cicero’s own line is the famous idiom in hac causa mihi aqua haeret — the clepsydra of the courts has stopped: in this case my water sticks. After Luca he cannot speak against the distribution; the older commitments do not let him speak for it. The rest is private and waits for the brother’s return: come quickly, the boys ask, and you will dine with us when you come.