Marcus to Quintus, written at Rome on the Ides of February 54 BC. (Older editions number the letter 2.9; the Teubner numbering is 2.10, sometimes 2.11.) Quintus has by this point left Italy: he will spend the spring and summer of the year as a legate on Caesar’s staff in Gaul, the engagement that will keep the brothers writing to each other across the campaigning season and around which much of Marcus’s correspondence in this year turns. The Perseus dateline carries 13 February — two days after the bribery decree reported in 2.7 — and the substantive news here is the next sitting: a thin Senate convened by the consul Appius Claudius Pulcher, broken up by a roaring crowd in freezing weather before any decree could be passed.

The body of the letter is the Commagene business and the Caesar business. Antiochus I of Commagene had asked the Senate to confirm the honours — including the right to wear the toga praetexta — granted him in Caesar’s consulship of 59 along with title to the small fortress of Zeugma on the Euphrates. Cicero, irritated and amused, broke up the proposal piece by piece in open Senate, getting laughs at the Bostrene analogy and the praetexta-patching joke and reducing the king’s case to ridicule; Appius, the consul whose business it was to shepherd the decree through, is now suing Cicero with flattery to drop the obstruction. The verse Cicero quotes — Iovis Hospitalis fidem, Graios omnis convocet, a fragment of Roman tragedy — is half-mock-threat, half-allusion to the reconciliation Pompey had brokered between him and Appius. The closing movement is Caesar in Gaul: a previous packet of letters had arrived from the front so water-soaked that Caesar could not even tell Cicero had written; the joke about his own poverty and Cicero’s pretended caution about the family strong-box is the warm political theatre of the moment when the two men were on cordial terms. The whole letter is Cicero in high holiday: hurried, gossipy, pleased with his own performance in a freezing Curia, certain his brother on Caesar’s staff will relish the news.