Cicero to Atticus, mid-July 59 BC, from Rome. The letter is the great document of the moment when the triumvirate’s standing collapsed in the public mood. §1 returns again to Statius (the freedman of Quintus, lately manumitted, which Cicero cannot stop grieving over) and to Clodius’s threats, which Cicero still claims he can either endure or escape. The Greek of §1 is Cicero’s self-judgment: “perhaps I am blind and stare too much at the seemly.”

§2 is the celebrated theatre passage. At the Apollinarian games of early July the tragedian Diphilus seized the lines of his role to taunt Pompey to his face: “by our misery you are great,” “a time will come when you will groan heavily for that virtue of yours,” the whole theatre roaring along. Caesar entered to dead silence; young Curio entered after him to ovations of the kind that used to greet Pompey when the commonwealth was safe. Pompey writes furious letters from Capua. The hostility extends to the equites who applauded Curio, and the triumvirs are threatening to repeal the Roscian law (reserved seats for knights at the games, 67 BC) and even the grain law. The sense of §2 is that the Roman political world is held now “more by hatred than by force,” and that “the populares have taught even modest men to hiss.”

§4 returns to private peril. Clodius threatens; Cicero counts his exercitus consularis, the army of every good man who saved the state in 63, as still firm; Pompey assures him that not a word will be said against him — which Cicero takes as Pompey deceiving himself, not deceiving Cicero. On Cosconius’s death Cicero has been invited to fill his vacancy in the agrarian commission of twenty; he refuses, since to step into a dead triumvir’s place would brand him in front of the world. Caesar’s offer of a Gallic legateship reappears as the more honourable way out. §5 closes with the cipher arrangement: in future delicate letters Cicero will sign as Laelius, Atticus as Furius, the rest in riddles. Bibulus’s edicts — the consul of 59 issuing his denunciations against the triumvirs from his own house, the year-long retort that gave the year its nickname “the consulship of Julius and Caesar” — are burning Pompey’s heart out. Note: section 3, present in some editions, is here absent (as in Perseus); the numbering jumps from 2 to 4.