Cicero to Quintus, written from Rome in mid- to late November 54 BC. The Perseus dateline reads only Scr. Romae ex. m. Nov. a. 700 (54), end of November; the body fixes the writing more precisely: §5 records the funeral of Serranus’s son on 24 November as a recent event, and §6’s news about the games and Milo’s preparations places the letter in the immediate sequence after Q. fr. 3.3 and 3.4 but before the year’s close.

Two letters from Quintus had reached Rome: the earlier one “full of vexation and complaints” (and another given to Labienus the day before), the more recent of which had set those distresses aside. §1 is the brother-counsel on bearing what life on Caesar’s staff in Gaul is asking of him: the design of the joining had not been the small advantages but “the most secure protection out of the goodwill of the best and most powerful man, towards the whole standing of our dignity.” §2 adds the caution about what should not be entrusted to letters, and about the courier route — the Nervii are in the field, the new winter-camp positions of the legions are not yet known to Cicero, and the letters need to go through Caesar’s couriers or Labienus’s. The siege of Quintus’s camp at Atuatuca by Ambiorix would come within the next several weeks.

§3 contains the two principal political moments of the letter: Caesar’s “courage and gravity in his deepest grief” (the bereavement of Julia, of which Cicero had received Caesar’s letter at the moment of Q. fr. 3.1 §17), and the news that the candidates of the year have been “relieved of their vexation” — the canvassing-prosecutions of late October are weakening, and Messala and Domitius are now counted as the probable consuls of 53. The poem to Caesar that Cicero had abandoned at Q. fr. 3.1 §11 will now be taken up again, on the leisure days of the November thanksgivings (the supplicationes voted to Caesar for the British expedition), and given to Caesar through Quintus. §4 is the running report on the dictatorship talk: the elections postponed, the interregnum coming; Pompey openly denies that he wants it, though to Cicero in person he had not denied it; C. Lucilius Hirrus is the tribune working to propose the law, and his self-regard (“without a rival,” a Catonian tag) is mocked. §6 is the report on Milo, who will give the ruinously extravagant games of 54 in spite of Cicero’s advice not to: Pompey has thrown him over for Cotta, and if Pompey is made dictator Milo “almost gives himself up for lost” — the shape of things that, with the killing of Clodius two months later, will produce the Pro Milone trial of April 52.

P. Crassus’s death at Carrhae had become known in Rome at the end of October (the first piecemeal reports), and the heavy public mood the year closes in — “the rumour of a dictatorship is unpleasant to the good men, and even more so to me are the things they are saying” (§4) — is the cumulative effect of the Carrhae news, the broken elections, and the dispersal of the legions for the worst Gallic winter of the campaign. The final domestic note (§5), the funeral oration delivered by Serranus on a script Cicero had written for him, is the unobtrusive private favour that runs alongside the political letter.