Cicero to Atticus, written at Rome on the Kalends of January 61 BC — the dating is fixed by the closing line, which gives the consuls (Messalla and Piso) for the year. The letter is the first of the corpus’s record of the great year of the Bona Dea trial. §1 is financial: the “Teucris” affair (a debtor whose nickname is borrowed from Plautus, in feminine form) is dragging on; Cicero will need to borrow from Considius, Axius, or Selicius (all the major Roman moneylenders), since Atticus’s cousin Caecilius will not lend below 12\%. The arrival of Pompey from the East has brought the news that Cicero’s old colleague Antonius is to be replaced as governor of Macedonia by Pompey’s motion — a turn that Cicero will neither defend nor wish to.

§2 is the freedman trouble: Cicero’s own freedman Hilarus is said to be in Macedonia with Antonius, gathering money in Cicero’s name, and Antonius is said to be saying so openly. Cicero does not believe it but is gravely disturbed and asks Atticus, who is travelling in Epirus, to look into it and to remove Hilarus if he can. §3 confirms what Att 1.13 will narrate at length: Clodius caught in women’s dress at Caesar’s during the rite pro populo, “saved and led out through the hands of a maidservant.” §4 closes on the gentle and famous sentence: a young reading-slave, Sositheus, has died, and has moved Cicero “more than a slave’s death seemed to call for.” Cicero asks Atticus to write often: “if you have no news, write whatever first comes to mind.”