Cicero to Atticus, written at Rome in May 55 BC — one of the shortest of the surviving Atticus letters, a single section of practical arrangements. The Halimetus affair was an issue between Egnatius and the jurist C. Aquilius Gallus on which Cicero had pressed Egnatius at Antium; Macro is one of Atticus’s people, an auction at Larinum on the Ides will keep Cicero from him; the Kalends and the day after are to be a dinner sequence (the Crassipes gardens then home, then dinner chez Cicero with Pilia) so he may be at Milo’s door first thing.

The line “facio fraudem senatus consulto” — “I am playing a trick on the senate’s decree” — is the letter’s single moment of light. The senate’s decree in question is probably the sumptuary regulation governing dinners at home; the Crassipes gardens lay just outside the city-line, and a dinner there counted as one “at an inn” rather than “at home,” beneath the decree’s reach. The whole letter is a flicker of late-spring 55 BC normality between the heavier political letters of the year.