Cicero to Atticus, written at Antium in April or May 56 BC. The letter is built on two losses — the death of P. Cornelius Lentulus Niger, the flamen Martialis, and what Cicero is now starting to admit is the loss of his political freedom. The two are stitched together in the great consoling formula of §1: Lentulus is fortunate, because he loved his country and the gods snatched him out of the incendium before he had to watch any more of it.

The lament of §2 is one of the most cited passages in the correspondence: “if I speak about the commonwealth what is right, I am thought a madman; if what is needful, a slave; if I am silent, crushed and captive.” The trichotomy is the political life of these months in three clauses. The Greek tag from Euripides’s Telephus — [Greek: Spartan elaches, tautan kosmei], “the Sparta you have drawn, adorn it” — is the resignation that hardens into program: take the lot you have been given and make something of it. The exemplum of Philoxenus, who would rather go back to the quarries than flatter Dionysius once more, is the wish that runs against the resignation. The whole letter is the conversation between the two.

§3 turns to Atticus’s standing request for a literary attack on Hortensius (who had recently given Cicero some grievance now lost to us). Cicero declines, with a beautifully tortuous reason: to write the thing would only make a small injury famous, and would invite the suspicion that what looked like depth ([Greek: bathytes]) in his forbearance was only frivolity (levitas) underneath. §4 closes with the famous mention of the letter to Lucceius (Fam. 5.12), in which Cicero is asking the historian to set down the consulship.