Cicero to Atticus, written from Rome at the end of November 54 BC, in answer to a letter just arrived announcing Atticus’s safe crossing back from Epirus. The opening is pure performance: four exclamations in a single rush, capped with relief that the voyage went better than the previous one (the corrupt Greek word derreis preserves Cicero’s nautical worry, though what exactly he remembered fearing is unrecoverable). The pun on Atticus’s “Latin Atticism” is the same affectionate teasing that runs through every letter of this year. Behind the high spirits, the political news is grim: open bribery, tribe by tribe, in the run-up to the elections; Gabinius acquitted on his return from Syria; talk of a dictatorship. Cicero registers it all in a single sentence that the manuscript has badly mangled — two obeli mark passages no editor has restored with confidence.

Section 2 turns to the consolation. Cicero’s “evenness of mind” in the face of all this is real, and rests on one plank: his connection with Caesar, who is treating Quintus magnificently in Gaul. The metaphor — una ex hoc naufragio tabula — is the letter’s emotional centre; the shipwreck is the republic, the plank is Caesar’s friendship, and Cicero is candid enough to say so to Atticus. The other news, dropped almost in passing, is that he himself has been made a legate to Pompey and will be formally outside the city from the Ides of January — a useful fiction. Closing on Dionysius the tutor, and the urgent request that Atticus and his household stay with him the day he arrives.