Cicero to T. Pomponius Atticus, his closest friend, in Athens. Late January 67 BC: Cicero is praetor-elect for the year and is corresponding routinely with Atticus, who is in Greece making his fortune from his estates in Epirus and Athens and from his money-lending business. The letter is one of the earliest extant in the corpus and shows the domestic register at its most intimate: a Naples house sale, Cicero’s brother Quintus’s relations with his wife Pomponia (Atticus’s sister, whom Cicero had brokered the marriage with), the recent death of Cicero’s father on 28 November (the calendar phrasing in the Latin is “a. d. iv Kal. Dec.”), and a request that Atticus send back from Athens any ornamenta gymnasi\=ode, gymnasium-style art, that would suit the Tusculan villa Cicero is furnishing. Two Greek words sit unannounced in the running Latin — the friend’s stylish vocabulary among friends — and the closing line, “send us word, as fully as you can, what you are doing in every matter and what you are about to do,” is the daily-bread sentence of Cicero’s letter corpus, repeated in some form across thirty years.