Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculan villa some time before July 67 BC. The opening is a small joke between friends: “I was at the Tusculan villa,” Cicero writes, in return for Atticus’s “I was in the Ceramicus” — the gymnasium of Athens whose name had become a tag between them. The letter is interrupted in the act of writing: a boy of Atticus’s sister at Rome brings a fresh letter and the courier going back leaves the same afternoon, so Cicero answers in haste. The body covers the running business of the friendship — the offended common friend to be appeased, more shipments of statues and Hermathenae and gymnasium ornament, the warning that Atticus’s library is not to be sold to anyone (“I am keeping all my little vintage proceeds for that, to make of it a support for old age”), and word that Quintus and Pomponia are reconciled enough that she is pregnant. The closing paragraph is significant: Cicero is standing for the praetorship at the elections of summer 67 and is freeing Atticus from any obligation to attend, since the work in Greece matters more. The famous closing line — Tullia summoning Atticus and naming her father as guarantor — echoes the joke of Att 1.8 and pins the dating: this is before the praetorian elections of 67.