Cicero to Quintus, written from Cicero’s Cuman or Pompeian villa in May 54 BC. Quintus has set out for Caesar’s army in Gaul (the parting at Rome and the letter from Ariminum, en route up the Adriatic); Cicero is on the bay of Naples, “except that I am without you, agreeably amusing myself.”

The letter is the first surviving notice of Cicero’s work on De Re Publica. The Greek politika of §1 is the title under which he is sketching it (“politika: a thick and laborious work indeed”), written within sight of the same sea. The closing self-deprecating flourish — “if it succeeds to my satisfaction, the labour will be well spent; if not, into that very sea which we look on as we write we shall throw it, and shall set out on something else, since to keep quiet we cannot” — is the late-Republican philosopher’s first commitment to a work that would, in fact, take three years to finish (drafted 54–51 BC, published in the Cilician proconsulship). The mention is in passing; the work is not yet a public title.

The body of the letter is in the standard mode of Q. fr.: practical commissions (the absent brother’s business in Rome to be attended to, the boy Cicero’s education to be looked after personally, with Cicero himself volunteering to “profess myself his teacher”); the recommendation of M. Orfius, military tribune in Caesar’s army, “a Roman knight, our connection on his own account and because he is from the township of Atella, which you know is in our trust”; and the urgent request — already the running theme — that Quintus “love Trebatius greatly.”