Cicero to Quintus, written from Tusculum at the close of October or the beginning of November 54 BC. The letter that the older numbering presents as Q. fr. 3.5 is, in modern editions (Shackleton Bailey and the Teubner), the combined letter Q. fr. 3.5+6 or 3.5b; the seven sections preserved here are the surviving body of what was, in the Perseus text, two letters run together. The piece is the most important single document for the composition of De Republica, and one of the most candid private moments of Cicero’s literary career: the brother-correspondence hinge on which a draft was scrapped and the work as we know it was begun.

§§1–2 are the famous narrative. At Cumae in the summer Cicero had begun a dialogue on the constitution of the State, structured on the nine-day holidays (novendiales feriae) of the year of Tuditanus and Aquilius (129 BC), with Scipio Africanus the Younger speaking shortly before his death to Laelius, Philus, Manilius, P. Rutilius Rufus, Q. Tubero, and Fannius and Q. Mucius Scaevola (the latter two Laelius’s sons-in-law); the work was to be distributed over nine days and nine books, on the best constitution and the best citizen. Two books had been finished. But when those books were being read aloud at Tusculum with Sallustius listening, Sallustius advised that the matter could be spoken on with much greater authority if Cicero spoke in his own person, especially since he was not “a Heraclides of Pontus but a consular and a man who had been involved in the greatest affairs of state” — a distinct compliment from a sharp listener, and the moment at which the conversational dialogue of the Cumaean draft began to be reshaped into the work that came down to us in fragments. The reservation Cicero attaches at §2 is the one objection he could not get around in the new plan: he could not touch “the greatest movements of our State” (the consulate of 63, the exile, the return) since they were later than the lifetimes of his speakers; and he had been pursuing precisely that effacement, “so as not, by running into our own times, to give offence to anybody.” The compromise — speak in propria persona to Quintus directly, by way of a dedication — was the final shape of De Republica’s six books as published in 51.

The other movements of the letter are characteristic of the autumn 54 register. §3 is the Caesar note: the Gallic dispatches arriving in October contained remarkable declarations of love (Caesaris amor); the promises annexed to them Cicero takes more cautiously (non valde pendeo), “I do not thirst for honours nor do I yearn for glory.” §4, the densest paragraph of the letter, is the broken cry under the polished surface of the year: “I am tormented, my sweetest brother, tormented at there being no commonwealth, no courts” — and the beautiful Homeric self-quotation (Iliad 6.208), the line Glaucus’s father had given him at his arming, has gone down in him: “[Greek: Pollon aristeuein kai hypeirochon emmenai all\=on] — always to be best and pre-eminent above the others.” The final clause is the most affectionate single sentence in the brother-correspondence: only Caesar, out of all men, has been found to love him as much as he could wish — or, as others say, who would want to.

§5 records the political moment of the year: had Cicero defended Gabinius on Pansa’s urging, he would have been “finished” (concidissem), because all the orders that hated Gabinius would have transferred their hatred to his defender. The fact that Cicero in fact escaped the request and only gave testimony is what the previous two letters (Q. fr. 3.2, 3.4) have already established; here, with Sallustius’s reproof of Q. fr. 3.4 already received, Cicero adds the obverse note — defending would have been worse. The library note follows on Tyrannio (“dilatory”) and Chrysippus; the closing §7 is the affectionate flourish on Quintus’s four tragedies dashed off in sixteen days (Electra, Troilus, and Erigone, with a fourth not named): “do you really ask after [Greek: pathos] when you have written an Electra and a Troilus?” The closing [Greek: gn\=othi seauton] (“know thyself”) is twisted on the way out: it is not only about diminishing arrogance, Cicero says, but about knowing our own good things, too. The line is the period’s most concentrated expression of the two brothers’ working relation.