Cicero to Atticus, written at Rome probably in August 59 BC. The letter is the first in the surviving correspondence to take Clodius’s coming tribunate (he is to enter office on 10 December) as the imminent threat that will dictate Cicero’s political conduct. §1 is the character sketch: “He flits about, he rages; he has nothing certain, he denounces many; what chance shall offer, that he seems about to do.” Clodius oscillates between attacking the triumvirs (whose unpopularity he sees) and attacking Cicero (when he recalls the triumvirs’ resources). §2 records Pompey’s intervention: Pompey has reproached Clodius to his face, telling him he himself — the man who had armed Clodius by letting him pass to the plebs — would be in the highest infamy of perfidy if Clodius were now to attack Cicero. Both Clodius and Appius (Clodius’s elder brother) have given Pompey their word; Clodius gave in at the end of the interview. But Clodius has not stopped speaking bitterly about Cicero in public.

§3–4 turn from policy to person. Cicero’s reputation is rising daily: the house is thronged in the morning salutations, men salute him in the streets, the memoria consulatus is renewed — and the prospect of the contest with Clodius now seems, “sometimes,” a thing worth meeting. He needs Atticus: at his side, by Varro, by Publius himself, by reading the truth in Pompey through [Greek: Ox-Eyed Hera] — the in-joke for Pompey’s wife Mucia, or in some readings for Clodia, with the Homeric epithet for Hera carrying the implication of marital intrigue. §5–6 close the political account: Pompey is sick of his own creation, the city’s hatred is universal, no foreseeable outcome but a bursting out somewhere. §7 is the letter’s coda: returned books, a new friend.