Cicero to Quintus, written from Tusculum at the close of October or beginning of November 54 BC. A very short note, two sections only — the briefest letter of the year — and written before dawn by the light of a little wooden lampstand that Quintus had had made for his brother on Samos.

The body of §1 is the flood. The Tiber broke in great violence; Crassipes’s promenade (Crassipes was Cicero’s son-in-law by the marriage of Tullia of 56 BC) was carried off, with the gardens and many shops, the water running all the way up to the Piscina Publica near the Porta Capena. The text at this point is corrupt — the manuscripts’ et Appia ad Martis mira luvies is the standard restoration: “and on the Appian Way, by the temple of Mars [just outside the Porta Capena], a wonderful flood.” Cicero reaches for two Homeric tags to make the moral. The first (Iliad 16.385–386) is a famous simile of Zeus loosing his autumn rains on men who have angered him; the second (16.387–388) is the gloss on the moral cause, the ones who in the assembly give crooked judgments and drive out right. The fit, Cicero says drily, is the acquittal of Gabinius, which had just been delivered (compare Q. fr. 3.4) under Pompey’s pressure: heaven and the city have rendered their respective verdicts on the same day.

The closing sentences are the small domestic counter-rhythm of the political letters of 54: the resolution to “not care about these things,” the plan to write fuller news about the dictatorship from Rome, the letters promised to Labienus and Ligurius (both with Quintus in Gaul), and the detail of the lampstand — a personal gift sent from Samos which the brother had had made for him during the eastern travels of an earlier year. The closing salutation, “my sweetest and best brother,” is the period’s stock formula between the two men.