Cicero to Quintus, written from Rome on the ninth day before the Kalends of November (24 October 54 BC), on the day Cicero set out for Tusculum with his son for the start of the ludi. The letter’s first three sections are the running report on the maiestas trial of Gabinius, which had just ended in acquittal; §§4–5 are the literary and library postscript; §6 the closing news about Pomptinus’s contested triumph.

Gabinius’s acquittal on the maiestas charge was the bitter conclusion of a half-year campaign that the last several Q. fr. letters have tracked — the rumour of his approach, his night-entry to Rome “as into a city full of enemies,” the universal hatred at his appearance before the people, the divinatio that named L. Lentulus the elder as accuser. Cicero gave the principal witness-testimony. The acquittal followed: thirty-two votes to convict against seventy to acquit, despite the incoherence of Lentulus and his subscribers and the squalor of the jury. The decisive weight, Cicero says, was three: the intensity of effort by the defence; the prayers (preces) of Pompey, whose political stake in Gabinius’s safety was direct; and the rumour of an impending dictatorship, which the Senate “feared.” Even so the verdict carries a heavy report behind it, and Gabinius’s coming trial for extortion (where Cicero himself would in fact be conscripted to defend him in 54/53, Pro Rabirio Postumo being the surviving relict of that affair) seems certain to convict.

The candid moment at §2 is Cicero’s private accounting of why he had not prosecuted Gabinius himself: the contest would have been one with Pompey, not with the defendant, and Cicero’s standing then was such that he could not undertake to be matched (the gladiatorial metaphor) against Pacideianus’s most famous opponent for Pompey’s sake. Sallustius — the historian’s namesake, probably C. Sallustius Crispus the future historian as a young man in Cicero’s circle — had been pressing him to prosecute one of the two recent triumvirate-clients (Gabinius or Vatinius) and yield the other to Pompey; the rebuke at §3 (“a charming friend Sallustius is, to think that I ought either to have taken on dangerous enmities or undergone everlasting disgrace”) is the only known stick Cicero took to him. The defendant’s parting word — that, if he had remained in the State, he would have given Cicero satisfaction — is what Cicero recovers from the ordeal.

The closing sections are domestic and literary. The [Greek: enthousiasmos] (§4) for the poetry Quintus has been asking after is absent: the year is anxious, even if not fearful. The library notes (§5) introduce Chrysippus and Tyrannio — the freedmen and scholars who handled Cicero’s book-procurement — as the channels through which Quintus’s Greek collection in Gaul will be brought up to strength. §6 is the report on Pomptinus’s triumph: C. Pomptinus, praetor of 63 BC who had defeated the Allobroges in the year of Cicero’s consulship, had been hovering outside the city for years seeking the triumph, and would finally hold it on 3 November 54, against the threatened veto of the praetors Cato and Servilius (and Q. Scaevola the tribune of the plebs, “breathing Ares,” [Greek: Ar\=e pne\=on], in the Homeric phrase). The first private notice of P. Crassus’s death in Parthia would arrive in Cicero’s circle in the days following this letter; here it is not yet known, the rumour of a dictatorship is still the principal alarm.