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Updated: June 19, 2025
The Epistolae ad Familiares include, besides Cicero's own letters, a large number of letters addressed to him by various correspondents; a whole book, and that not the least interesting, consists of those sent to him during his Cilician proconsulate by the brilliant and erratic young aristocrat, Marcus Caelius Rufus, who was the temporary successor of Catullus as the favoured lover of Clodia.
If so, it is most natural to suppose her the same with that abandoned woman, the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher, whom Cicero brands with infamy in his speech for Caelius. Unwillingness to associate the graceful verse of Catullus with a theme so unworthy has perhaps led the critics to question without reason the identity.
About the same time, as many as eighty transports of the Carthaginians were captured, near Sardinia, by Cneius Octavius, who had the government of that province. Caelius states that they were laden with corn and provisions, sent for Hannibal; Valerius, that they were conveying the plunder of Etruria, and the Ligurian mountaineers who had been captured, to Carthage.
Cicero tells Atticus that he rebuked Caelius for pressing him thus hard to do what his conscience could not approve, and that it was not right, in his opinion, for a provincial governor to set the people of Cibyra hunting for panthers for Roman games.
Equidem jam effeci ut maxime plebs et qui antea noster fuit populus vester esset." Caelius to Cicero, Ad Fam., viii. 71. Caesar says nothing of his putting to sea in a boat, meaning to go over in person, and being driven back by the weather. The story is probably no more than one of the picturesque additions to reality made by men who find truth too tame for them.
Cicero, however, whose instincts were not military, served only in one campaign, at the age of seventeen, and apparently he advised Caelius to do no more than this. Caelius served under Q. Pompeius proconsul of Africa, to whom he was attached as contubernalis, choosing this province because his father had estates there.
As the sole civil profession to which boys of high family would aspire was that of the bar, a father would send his son during that interval to a distinguished advocate to be taken as a pupil. Cicero himself was thus apprenticed to Mucius Scaevola the augur: and in the same way the young Caelius, as soon as he had taken his toga virilis, was brought by his father to Cicero.
But as it speedily became plain that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect from him was some alleviations of payment and modifications of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry. For whom then had the popular party conquered, if not for the people? Caelius and Milo
I might likewise observe of C. Caelius, that he was a man of great application, and many eminent qualities, and had eloquence enough to support the private interests of his friends, and his own dignity in the State.
In 664 Gaius Caelius had fought with the Salyes about Aquae Sextiae, and in 674 Gaius Flaccus, on his march to Spain, with other Celtic nations.
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