Cicero to Atticus, written at Antium in mid-April 59 BC. The triumvirs (“these as the senders”) have offered Cicero a free legateship to Egypt — the journey he had long wished to make, since he had not seen the East — and Cicero is on the ground of refusing it. The Iliadic tags are the keys: “I am ashamed before the Trojans and the long-robed Trojan women” (Hector, before going out to face Achilles); “Polydamas first will fasten reproach on me” (Hector again, of how the Trojans will judge him if he flees). The opinion of Cato “alone to me as a hundred thousand” is the present anxiety; the opinion of “the histories six hundred years hence” the deeper one. Cicero closes the paragraph by noting that there is some glory also in not accepting, and asks Atticus, if Pompey’s agent Theophanes happens to broach the subject, not to shut it utterly down.

The other half is the consular field for 58 BC — “whether Pompey and Crassus, or Servius Sulpicius with Gabinius” — and the augurate, the one office in which Cicero might be tempted by them, plus the reform of Publius Clodius’s tribunate-by-adoption. The letter ends on the now-familiar resolve: “I shall philosophize.”