Cicero to Atticus, written at first light at Venusia shortly before setting out southward — the Perseus dateline gives ii aut prid. Id. Mai., 14 May 51 BC, and the letter says it was handed off as Cicero left Venusia on the morning of the Ides itself, 15 May. The opening is unusually flat: nothing to charge, nothing to tell, no room for joking — “so many cares press on me.” The note is plainly written at the rate at which the journey south is being made, day by day. Atticus’s letters are to follow him to Brundisium, where Cicero will be waiting on his legate Pomptinus through the date Atticus himself has fixed.

The second section signals two pieces of business in the shorthand the friendship runs in. The first is the conversations Cicero is about to have at Tarentum with Pompey on the state of the republic — Greek dialogous, shading the word toward Platonic colour — which he promises to write out in full afterwards. The second is the financial item: an unsettled sum of twenty thousand and eight hundred thousand sesterces (the meaning of the doubled numeral is the old crux), which Cicero wants cleared before Atticus leaves Rome for Epirus. The wider Tullia-dowry and prefects business of the adjacent letters does not surface here by name; the quod auctore te velle coepi adiutore adsequar at the close suggests, however, that the financial item is part of the same Oppius transaction pressed in 5.4.