Cicero to Atticus, written on 10 May 51 BC from the Pompeian villa on the day of his departure southward toward Brundisium and the unwanted Cilician command. The first letter in the manuscript order of book 5 of the Atticus correspondence after the missing-or-displaced opening; chronologically the second of the journey-south series, written the morning he was leaving Pompeii for Trebula. The body opens with the day’s itinerary and a report of a visit at the Cumanum from Q. Hortensius Hortalus — which Cicero treats as a piece of good fortune, because Hortensius is offering himself as the man at Rome who will press, when the time comes, that Cicero’s provincial command not be extended beyond the year the lex Pompeia allows. Atticus is asked to second the courtesy at Rome, and the tribune-designate C. Furnius is being lined up on the same cause.

Section 2 is a small Pompeian comedy of manners: amid the crowd of grandees at Cumae who came in numbers to see Cicero, M. Vestorius’s man Rufio managed not to call on him — a strategem (strategemate is the Greek-derived word) for which Cicero claims to give the man credit, since he made no effort to be praised. The pun is dry; Cicero salutes him in passing at the Puteoli market and lets the slight pass. §3 turns to the real consolation: he hopes the burden will last no longer than a single year. Atticus is asked, when he is back from Epirus, to put his weight behind keeping the appointment short. The closing paragraph is the political weather report — Caesar’s reaction to a recent decree, a worrying rumour about the Transpadanes electing quattuorviri on Roman municipal lines — with one obelized verb that the manuscript has not yielded up; Pompey, who is at Tarentum, is to be the source of better information. The launch-prompt summary mentions “Pomptina”; this is a confusion for Pomptinus, the legate Cicero is waiting on at Brundisium, who is named in the adjacent letters but not in 5.2 itself.