Cicero to his brother Quintus, written at Rome at the beginning of February 54 BC — Quintus by then had set out for Caesar’s camp in Gaul. The letter is brief, conversational, and proverbial. Quintus’s writing-tablets have demanded a letter; the matter itself, Cicero says, gives him no subject, but conversation between brothers is allowed to ramble. The verb alucinari (“to ramble, to babble at random”) gives the licence.

Section 2 carries the famous pun. The Tenedians of the island near Troy had asked the Senate for some restoration of liberty; the Senate refused. “Cut off by a Tenedian axe” — securi Tenedia — is a proverb (the Tenedian axe was notoriously sharp), turned to the present case where the applicants were themselves Tenedian. Cicero notes who voted with him: M. Bibulus, M. Calidius, M. Favonius — all four men of the optimate front. The Magnesians from Sipylum, by contrast, sang Quintus’s praises for blocking L. Sestius Pansa.

Section 3 is the famous Cicero on Lucretius. “Many flashes of genius, yet much craft as well” — the Latin is multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis (text disputed; some editors read non multae tamen artis, “yet of no great craft”). The reading on either side is brief and Quintus had already sent his own appraisal. “But —- when you come.” That, like much of the brothers’ literary criticism, will be in person. The closing joke on Sallustius’s Empedoclea (a tedious cosmological poem in Empedoclean hexameters by Cn. Sallustius, friend of Cicero, not the historian) is the brothers’ shared playfulness on each other’s reading.