Marcus to Quintus, written at Rome on 14 February 54 BC (a. d. xvi K. Martias). Quintus is now in Gaul on Caesar’s staff — a posting his elder brother had taken pains to broker — and the daily reports from Rome serve as much to keep his spirits up as to inform him. Quintus’s last letter had evidently included some piece of paradox he labelled “black snow,” and Marcus picks up the joke approvingly: the brother is in good humour and ready to play, which delights him. The line on Pompey and Caesar is the political ground of the season: with Crassus heading east, Pompey hovering over Italy, and Caesar absorbing Gaul, the triumvirate’s grip is by now total, and Cicero — chastened by the events of 56 and 55 BC — is openly Caesarean. “He is in my heart,” he tells Quintus, “and I do not loosen the bond.”

The middle sections are a hurried bulletin of city news. Cicero’s young protégé M. Caelius Rufus is to be prosecuted again, this time it seems by the loathsome Pola Servius and at the urging of the Clodian faction — the same network whose attack he had repelled, with Cicero’s help, in the Pro Caelio two years before. The Tyrian embassy against the Syrian tax-farmers brought a packed Senate, where Gabinius (back from his Syrian governorship and shortly to face his own trials) was savagely handled, and L. Aelius Lamia, defending the equestrian jurors against Domitius Ahenobarbus, scored a clean retort: “We give the verdicts; you pronounce the praises.” The third section turns to procedure — the consul Appius Claudius Pulcher reading the lex Pupia and lex Gabinia so as to keep the Senate sitting daily for embassies through February, which will likely shove the elections into March — and the fourth, the most affectionate, drops politics altogether for the Greek historians Quintus has been reading on campaign: Callisthenes, Philistus of Syracuse (“almost a Thucydides in miniature”), and Dionysius. Marcus urges his brother to take up history himself, promises a fresh dispatch on the Lupercalia (15 February), and ends with a hug for the nephew, the young Cicero.