Cicero to Atticus, written at Athens on 6 July 51 BC (the day before the Nones of July), Cicero’s tenth and last day in the city before setting sail for Asia. He has been writing letters home and none to Atticus, and opens with a spasm of self-reproach and a plea — “by all our fortunes!” — that Atticus prevent any prolongation of the Cilician command. The journey-letters’ refrain is now a drumbeat: flagrem desiderio urbis, “I burn with longing for the city.” A swift political bulletin follows: the consul M. Claudius Marcellus has had a magistrate of Novum Comum flogged — an act repudiating Caesar’s grant of Latin rights to Transpadane Gaul, foul to Cicero and a deliberate provocation to Caesar — and Pompey, with whom Cicero has been corresponding through the Greek freedman Theophanes, has been talked out of any flight to Spain.

The body of the letter is the proconsul’s own progress report. He is at Athens with his legate Pomptinus, the quaestor, and a flotilla of light Rhodian and Mytilenean craft; only Atticus’s friend Tullius is missing from the staff. He believes the journey’s good Greek reputation is holding, with the proverbial caveat [Greek: hoiaper hē despoina, toiai kai therapainides] — as the mistress, so are the maids — that staff discipline rests on his own. The final two sections are pure Atticus-business: prefectures to be handed out (Cicero will not repeat the error he made in the case of Appuleius), the Epicurean garden’s request that he ask the Athenian Areopagus to vacate a decree against their school, routed delicately through C. Memmius (the patron of Lucretius, then at Mytilene, who held the lease on the disputed property), and finally a quiet word about Pilia, Atticus’s wife: her letter to Cicero arrived very tender, do not let her know he has read it. The corrupt nomanaria at the close has defied emendation; the body translation preserves the cross, and the textual decision belongs to a future translator’s note.