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Cicero's Letters to his Friends

Book V

I

Q. Metellus Celer[1] to M. T. Cicero

Cisalpine Gaul, January, 62 B.C.

1 If you are in good health, it is well. I had imagined, considering our mutual regard and the renewal of our friendship, that I should have escaped being ridiculed and insulted in my absence, and that my brother would not have had his civil rights and his property attacked through you, all for a mere phrase.[2] If his own propriety of conduct[3] was not enough to protect him, either the prestige of our family or my own earnest devotion to you all and the Republic ought to have been enough to help him in his need. As it is, I see him caught in the toils, and myself abandoned, and that by those in whom such conduct might have been least expected.

2 And so I am in mourning, and wear the garb of

  1. ↑ The two Metelli, Celer and Nepos, were probably brothers, sons of Q. Metellus Nepos, consul in 98. The writer of this letter was praetor in 63, and helped to quell the Catilinarian rebellion. He was now governor of Cisalpine Gaul (not proconsul, though so called), a province which Cicero had renounced in his favour. He was consul with L. Afranius in 60, and died in 59, poisoned, it was suspected, by his wife Claudia, sister of P. Clodius. The incident here mentioned is explained in Cicero's reply to Celer in the next letter.
  2. ↑ By "a mere phrase" he must mean the veto imposed by his brother as tribune. See note on p. 328.
  3. ↑ Or "the respect due to him."
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