Cicero to Atticus, written at Athens on the eve of his crossing into Asia — the Perseus dateline gives “the day before the Kalends or the Kalends of July, 51 BC,” that is 30 June or 1 July. Cicero has now been four days at Athens, still waiting for his legate Pomptinus, and is filling the time by walking among the haunts that bear Atticus’s footprints from the years his friend lived there. The first section is pure feeling: every conversation turns to Atticus. The second is the centrepiece of the journey-letters’ running self-portrait — a proconsul who has impressed on his whole staff that they must serve his fama, who is taking nothing for himself either under the lex Julia de repetundis (Caesar’s extortion law of 59) or from his hosts; and a man who knows enough not to take a victory lap until the year is over.

The third section is the inward counterweight, full of the Greek tags Cicero scatters more freely in letters to Atticus than to anyone else. He quotes the Homeric tag [Greek: erdoi tis hēn hekastos eideiē technēn] — “let each man practise the craft he was born for,” from the lost Margites (a line later proverbial) — to sigh that the proconsulship is a craft he was not born for. He bears the daily affronts of his entourage with a straight face, but the strain on his [Greek: bathytēs], his “depth of composure,” is real, and the year’s hard [Greek: meletē] (training, discipline) will be its own philosophical exercise. The closing section deflates philosophy back to gossip: Athens itself is charming, its present-day Academic chair Aristus less so (the corrupt sursum deorsum “up and down” shows the manuscript already troubled by Cicero’s joke), and the gentler Xeno of the Epicurean garden, ceded to Quintus, is his pleasanter daily company. He ends with the same anxious question of every letter on this road: when will Atticus next be at Rome to attend to his affairs?