Cicero to Atticus, written at the family estate at Arpinum in April or May 56 BC. A short, dense running-the-household letter on three matters: relief about young Quintus (Cicero’s nephew), against whom Chaerippus had been spreading some now-lost report; the Apollonius affair, a Greek going bankrupt who imagines himself entitled to the indulgence shown to Roman equites; and the death of a Metellus, whose estate, on Cicero’s surety, will pay Atticus what he is owed — “unless he made Publius (Clodius) his heir, he has made a man.”

The closing section is the Roman-property routine that runs through these months: see to the house in Rome (still being rebuilt after the Clodian sack), post guards, remind Milo. The Arpinate complaint about Laterium (Quintus’s villa near Arpinum) gets a Homeric tag for its dismissal: [Greek: ho de ouk empazeto] — “but he heeded not.” Look after the boy Cicero, as you do.