Cicero to Quintus, written from Rome before light on the fifth day before the Ides of October (11 October 54 BC). The letter is the close-up of two political moments: the divinatio that opened the prosecution of Gabinius, and the canvassing-charges hurricane that descended on all four candidates for the consulship of 53 BC.

Gabinius, returned from his Syrian governorship to the universal hatred reported in Q. fr. 3.1, has been rolled up in the Senate. The narrative at §2 is the only first-person account of an unforgettable scene: Gabinius, having boasted that he would demand a triumph, slipping into Rome by night “as into a city full of enemies”; then, on the tenth day on which he had to report the campaign returns, creeping into the Senate at lowest attendance. With the publicans brought in, with Cicero slicing him to pieces, Gabinius lost his nerve and called Cicero “an exile”; the whole Senate rose to a man, “with a shout, as if it would go up against his very body.” Cicero’s recorded reaction is the small candid moment of the letter: “nothing more honourable has ever happened to us.” The following morning the divinatio against Gabinius would name the prosecutor for the maiestas charge, contested between Memmius, Ti. Nero, and the two Antonii.

Cicero himself does not prosecute Gabinius (Pro Rabirio Postumo of the next year would force him into the opposite role, defending one of Gabinius’s collaborators). Three reasons are given at §2: he does not wish to fight Pompey (Pompey was vehemently working for Gabinius’s acquittal); he has no faith in the jurors of these courts; and he fears that, with him as accuser, “something might happen” — the same Pompey-Gabinius backstop that, in fact, would secure Gabinius’s acquittal at the maiestas trial later in October before being undone by his conviction on extortion. The Greek tag apoteugma — “failure,” the technical word from athletic and forensic contests for the missed throw — is the candid private reckoning.

The four-way bribery hurricane of §3 (every candidate prosecuting his rival for ambitus) is the prelude to the famous interregnum of late 54 BC: with the courts gummed up and the elections pushed past 1 January, the state spent the first half of 53 BC without consuls. The “Lentulus” of the closing flourish is P. Lentulus Spinther the elder (Cicero’s correspondent of Fam.\ 1), who as interrex of the year prosecuted Gabinius for maiestas; “Appius” is Ap. Claudius Pulcher, the brother of Clodius, who would step into the consulship of 53 without the curiate law that would normally have been required. The closing domestic note — the contractors at Quintus’s house “not handling it undiligently” — is the fixed counter-rhythm of the political letters of 54.