Cicero to Quintus, written from Rome on or about the Kalends of November 54 BC. The dateline in the manuscripts is corrupt (a. d. xit K. Nov.); modern editors read the Kalends themselves — 1 November — on the body of the letter’s evidence, with the Gabinius maiestas verdict still expected “within three days” (§3). Four sections, dictated to a secretary at the end of a day spent defending in court.

The first section is the private side of the letter — the painful interval, more than fifty days, in which not a letter and not even a rumour from Quintus, from Caesar, or from northern Gaul had reached Rome. Caesar’s second British campaign was being concluded in October; the Channel crossing back to Gaul and the winter dispersal of the legions were imminent. Cicero’s anxiety about “the sea over there and the land” is the running undercurrent of the year’s letters; the news that came up to Rome in the next weeks — Quintus and his legion of recruits would later be besieged in his winter camp by Ambiorix and the Eburones — would justify the worry.

The political news in §2 is the famous four-candidate ambitus hurricane that the previous letter (Q. fr. 3.2) had inaugurated. By 1 November every man standing for the consulship of 53 had been prosecuted for canvassing; the elections were being knocked off, one day at a time, through formal announcements of bad omens (obnuntiationes), with the entire boni class delighted, because the consuls of 54 were under universal suspicion of having taken bribes from the candidates to fix the result. The pact (exposed by Memmius in the Senate on 30 September) had been a four-way collusion in which Memmius and Calvinus, the candidates favoured by Caesar’s money, agreed with the consuls Appius Claudius and Domitius Calvinus to deliver Memmius and Calvinus to the fasces in exchange for fraudulent senatorial votes after the fact. Of the four candidates Cicero is now most concerned with M. Valerius Messala Rufus, whom he would later defend on the ambitus charge; “our Messala safe” is, as he says, “linked also to the safety of the rest.” Gabinius prosecuted on top of his maiestas ordeal: P. Sulla the former candidate of 66 BC, his stepson C. Memmius (distinct from the consular candidate), his brother Caecilius, and his son Faustus Sulla flanking the prosecution. L. Torquatus, who argued against (probably defending the substantive prosecution), failed despite popular goodwill.

§3 reports on the impending maiestas verdict; this letter precedes Q. fr. 3.4 by a few days, and when the news of acquittal (32 to 70) breaks Cicero will write a fuller post-mortem in the next letter. Cn. Domitius Calvinus is the consular candidate of the year sitting as juror in the maiestas trial; Alfius the president of the court is the man whose edict on maiestas brought Gabinius back to Rome in Q. fr. 3.1 §24. §4 closes the letter on the boy Cicero’s education — the running theme of Q. fr. 3 —: the rhetor Paeonius is good, the boy is doing well, but the genre is the declamatory rather than the theoretical, and Cicero will draw him into “our paths” on country trips. The closing charge to Quintus to write where and with what hope he is wintering, the small private hinge that the next letter (Q. fr. 3.4) will not yet have an answer to.