Cicero to Atticus, written at Rome in 66 BC. Cicero is praetor of the year (the year of Pro Lege Manilia and Pro Cluentio); the letter mentions his prosecution of Gaius Licinius Macer for extortion (Macer’s condemnation, the people’s enthusiastic approval, Cicero’s reflection that the political fruit of conviction was greater than the personal fruit of acquittal would have been). Atticus is being asked yet again to come back to Rome — this time in time for Quintus’s tribunician election and to wind up at last the endless Acutilian quarrel. The third paragraph is the running art-collection thread: a Hermathena — a single herm with the heads of Hermes and Minerva — has arrived for Cicero’s Academy at Tusculum, where Cicero notes with delight that “Hermes is common to all and Minerva is the singular emblem of that gymnasium.” The closing line is the famous one: “Keep your books, and do not despair that I shall be able to make them mine. If I succeed in that, I outdo Crassus in wealth, and despise the country places and water-meadows of all the others.”