Cicero to T. Pomponius Atticus, written from Minturnae on 5 or 6 May 51 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Menturnis iii aut prid. Non. Mai. a. 703 (49), where the parenthetical year is a misprint: AUC 703 = 51 BC, and the contents place the letter firmly in the first stage of Cicero’s reluctant journey to his governorship of Cilicia. The first two sections wrap up Roman business at Atticus’s door — the desire that no extension of the proconsular term be decreed, the giving of sureties on land transfers, a credit Atticus has just opened with Oppius for 800,000 sesterces.

The body of the letter — and the reason it is so often quoted — is the third and fourth sections: a small, exact account of a domestic blow-up between Cicero’s brother Quintus and his wife Pomponia, who is Atticus’s sister. The party stops overnight at the family estate at Arcanum on the road to Aquinum; Quintus, in front of Cicero, asks Pomponia to invite the women in to lunch while he gathers the men; Pomponia says in everyone’s hearing that she is “a guest here myself,” declines food sent from the table, locks Quintus out of her bedroom. Cicero is mortified, takes his brother’s side, and writes to Atticus partly so Atticus will speak to her — “you, too, have a part in setting this right.” Statius is Quintus’s freedman steward, whose having gone on ahead to see to the lunch is what Pomponia is reacting to. The closing requests are practical: Atticus is to finish a list of errands before sailing for Epirus, dislodge the dilatory legate Pomptinus, and report his own movements.