Cicero to Atticus, written at Brundisium on the second or third of June 51 BC. Cicero has been stuck on the heel of Italy for twelve days, waiting on his legate C. Pomptinus and shaking off a minor illness, before he can sail for his unwanted Cilician command. The opening section is the briefest travel-bulletin, but the news that has just reached him from Atticus — the death of Atticus’s mother, alluded to by Shackleton Bailey but in this surviving text passing without the explicit notice it must have had in the lost portion or companion letter — and the press of his own affairs leave little room for ceremony. In the manuscript order of Atticus book 5 the letter falls late; in chronology it is the first of the Cilician series, written before the sailing.

The body of the letter is Cicero’s anxious request that Atticus, if still at Rome, intervene in the financial tangle surrounding the property of T. Annius Milo. Milo, exiled to Massilia after the trial for the killing of Clodius, had had his estate sold up; Cicero had agreed — on C. Duronius’s advice — to have his own freedman-agent Philotimus take a share in the purchase, with the aim of keeping the property within friendly hands, protecting Milo’s slaves from being broken up by a hostile buyer, and securing the settlement Milo wished for his wife Fausta. Word has come back to Brundisium that Milo is complaining of the arrangement, and Cicero backpedals at once: if Milo and Fausta are unhappy, Philotimus is to be withdrawn. The closing formula — “you shall settle it as it seems to fit with my honour, my reputation, and my interest” — is the standard Ciceronian delegation, but sharpened here by distance and haste.