Cicero to Atticus, written at Actium on 17 June 51 BC (a.d.~xvii Kal.~Quint.) on his arrival from Corcyra. The crossing of the Adriatic has been bad enough that Cicero prefers to march overland from Actium rather than risk rounding Cape Leucas in light skiffs; the unwillingly appointed proconsul is still inching his way east toward Cilicia. Atticus has stocked his villa-host friends at Corcyra and Sybota with provisions for the party, and Cicero opens with a foodie’s thank-you note before turning to the real subject: his determination, repeatedly urged on him by Atticus in person, to govern his province with the “utmost restraint and the utmost abstinence,” summa modestia et summa abstinentia. The fixed star of his Cilician year is to be that nothing extorted or extracted shall stain his return.

The second section is one of Cicero’s running running commissions to Atticus: he wants regular news from Rome, above all about money he is owed (the “twenty thousand and the eight hundred,” two outstanding sums whose exact identity has long been debated), and he wants Atticus to work the Senate’s grandees — Hortensius above all — so that his proconsular year is not prolonged and not silently extended by an intercalary month. This concern with the length of the command will recur, more anxiously, in every letter of the journey east. The closing pleasantries — the “most modest and most charming” young Marcus, the freedman tutor Dionysius who is in good standing because he loves Atticus too — show Cicero’s domestic warmth unbruised by the long unwelcome road.