Cicero to Atticus, written at Antium in mid-April 59 BC — Caesar’s consular year, with the agrarian law already passed and Cicero in semi-retirement on the coast. Several short pieces. §1, the receipt of Serapion’s book on geography (Cicero confesses he scarcely understands a thousandth of it). §2 is the news that Clodius is going as a free legate to Tigranes in Armenia — a temporary withdrawal that Cicero does not regret, since it gives him time to see what kind of “priest of the Bona Dea” Clodius is going to be (the sneering reference back to the 62 BC scandal). §3, the geographical commission Atticus has set him — which becomes, in part, the great unfinished work that Strabo later overshadowed. §4, Cicero’s stated withdrawal from public matters: “I have decided to think about public matters no longer” — the line that holds for less than a month before the corpus reverses itself. §5, Terentia’s grove of Epirote trees, “apart from the Dodonaean oak we lack nothing.” §6, the running invitation to Atticus to visit. §7, the wall of the Palatine palaestra, with the dark sentence in the middle: “in times like these, with every best man’s life so doubtful, I greatly value one summer’s enjoyment of the wrestling-school on the Palatine.”