Cicero to Atticus, written at Beneventum on 12 May 51 BC, the day after he had reached the town from the Trebulan villa of Pontius (Ad Atticum 5.3 of 11 May). The Perseus dateline has a year-number typo — “701” for 703 — but the day-of-month is secure: iv Id. Mai., 12 May. The letter answers a double delivery from Atticus that came in at Beneventum within hours of each other, one carried by Funisulanus before dawn, the other by the secretary Tullius. The first and greatest business is the search for a husband for Tullia: Atticus has been working on it, but his own approaching departure for Epirus, and the fact that the most plausible candidate is one whom Atticus calls dysdiagnoston — hard to read — leaves Cicero with little leverage from a thousand miles away. A wistful aside imagines what Servilia might have done with Servius Sulpicius Rufus if either Atticus or Cicero had been at Rome to push the match.

The rest of the letter is the running mass of small business that Cicero’s setting-out has thrown up at once. Section 2 disposes of a string of items in a single page: M. Marcellus’s affair, the credit for which is to be entered to Cicero and Bibulus jointly; Torquatus; the absent Maso and Ligus; the petitioner Chaerippus, on whom Atticus has now “lifted the prosneusin” — removed the favourable inclination — and at whom Cicero throws an exasperated o provincia!; the speed at which his legate Pomptinus is now expected at Brundisium; the prefects Pompey will appoint. The practical heart is in §3 with the eight hundred thousand sesterces owed Oppius, which Cicero wants cleared up before Atticus leaves Rome. §4 closes with an embarrassed joke about Atticus’s complaint that he is short of paper: Cicero will send two hundred sheets, though the cramped little page of this very letter is a comment on his own thrift.