Marcus to Quintus, written at Rome shortly after 11 February 55 BC. Quintus has just left Rome — probably for the country — and Marcus reports the political week overnight. The frame is the brother’s compliment to a liber of Marcus’s that has just appeared, almost certainly the third book of De Temporibus Suis — the poem on his exile and recall whose interlocutor is the muse Vrania and which closed with a speech of Jupiter on the orator’s vindication. The remark illa omnia mihi magis scripsi quam ceteris — “I wrote all that more for myself than for the rest” — is one of the most candid glosses Cicero ever gave on his own self-glorifying verses.

The substantive news is the working of the new consulships. Pompey and Crassus, consuls for the second time, have taken Rome in hand; the senatorial fight Cicero had waged in 56 is over. The little vignette of the night call on Pompey, then the daytime escort of Crassus from the Senate (consulem ex senatu domum reduxi), then the offer to broker — if Cicero will not stand in the way of some profitable Clodian legation — is the theatre of the new politics. The young Publius Crassus, the host’s son and Cicero’s admirer, is the silent witness; the Brogitaran embassy and the “free” legation to Byzantium are the kinds of money-rich provincial errands a tribune of 58 BC like Clodius could expect to convert to coin.

The closing paragraph is the second movement: the Senate’s bribery decree of 11 February in the formula proposed by Afranius, with the consuls (Pompey and Crassus) refusing to add the praetor-elect provision that would have required sixty private days before assuming office — the provision Cato had pressed and they rejected outright. The verdict at the end is sharp: tenent omnia idque ita omnis intellegere volunt — “they hold everything, and they want everyone to know it.”