Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa at the very end of April or beginning of May 59 BC. Caesar’s agrarian law has been carried at the start of the year; the news that has reached Cicero on his couch is that the Campanian land — previously kept as a state asset and exempted from the bill — is to be added to the distribution under a second law. Cicero turns it over the night through and writes §1 the next day in self-consolation: the Campanian land cannot support more than five thousand men, the rest of the urban populace will be alienated from the triumvirs by it, and the abolition of the tolls of Italy plus this distribution will leave only the inheritance-tax of one twentieth as Roman state revenue — which will be “bound to perish in one little public meeting.”

§2 is the most exuberant single paragraph of the letter corpus on Pompey’s transformation from constitutionalist to agent of the triumvirate. The Greek tag from Sophocles or some lost tragedian (“he blows now no longer with little pipes but with savage bellows without the muzzle”) sets the key. Cicero impersonates Pompey through the standard sophistic defences he has been giving (“he approved Caesar’s laws,” “the agrarian law pleased him,” “about Bibulus watching the sky”), then turns and addresses him as “Sampsiceramus” — the nickname Cicero adopts for Pompey throughout 59, after the petty Syrian dynast Pompey had reduced — demanding to know how he will defend taking the Campanian land too. The imagined Pompey replies: “I shall hold you down, crushed, by Caesar’s army.” Cicero answers that what holds him down is not the army but the ingratitude of the so-called good men, who have given him no thanks even in conversation.

The letter resolves with the famous philosophical choice (§3): Dicaearchus (Atticus’s man, the Peripatetic of the active life) and Theophrastus (Cicero’s man, of the contemplative life) are at odds. Cicero has, he says, given Dicaearchus full measure; now he turns to Theophrastus and resolves to “bend, our dear Titus, to those splendid pursuits, and go back at last to the place from which we ought never to have departed.” The famous turn from politics to philosophy at the doorstep of exile is here in skeleton.

The closing paragraph (§4) is on Quintus, whose latest letter is a Chimaera “lion in front, snake behind” — lamenting his Asian stay yet asking Cicero to correct and publish his annals — and on a practical question of the Asian transport-toll which the publicans (Pompey’s allies) are pressing.