Marcus to Quintus, written at Rome in December 54 BC — the last and longest of the surviving letters of book 3, and the closing word in the year-long Roman dispatch Quintus had been reading on the Gallic frontier while serving on Caesar’s staff. The opening section is the answer to Quintus’s anxious queries about the Gabinius trial: Cicero testified summa cum gravitate, was not the prosecutor, and the acquittal — foul and ruinous though it was — has had at least the perverse benefit of dulling his political sensitivity. The Homeric tag [Greek: tote moi chanoi] — “then may [the earth] open up for me” — breaks off in mid-line: it is the cry of Agamemnon and of Hector that whoever sees them in such- and-such disgrace should witness the earth gape and swallow them. Cicero clips it; the aposiopesis is the gesture. The verdict at the close is the candid summary that controls the rest: nihil est enim perditius his hominibus, his temporibus — “there is nothing more abandoned than these men, than these times.”

The remainder is the household letter: literary work, the boys, Milo’s coming consular trial, an enormous gladiatorial outlay (the corrupt sum at §2 is some staggering figure), a courier hunt for the epos ad Caesarem (the hexameter epic on Caesar’s British expedition, lost to us), and the running building report on Quintus’s villa at Arcanum — in which the elaborate statue programme is judged work for “many a Philotimus, not for any Diphilus,” Philotimus being Terentia’s freedman steward and Diphilus the slow-moving contractor of Q. fr. 3.1. The Homeric tag [Greek: ho de mainetai ouk et’ anekt\=os] (Iliad 8.355, of Hector raging beyond endurance) is fired off at Milo’s spendthrift contractor of gladiators; the colloquial [Greek: all’ oim\=oz\=et\=o] (“let him howl for it!”) dismisses the misobsignation of the will of one Felix, by which Quintus has lost his twelfth-part legacy. The closing line on the boy — young Marcus, kept with his mother Porcia in view of his appetite at table — is the affectionate domestic cadence on which the book ends.