Cicero to Atticus, written at sea in mid-July 51 BC — the Perseus dateline puts the letter in medio mari in the middle of July, and the body confirms it: “as I write, I was literally in the middle of the sea.” Cicero has made the run from Piraeus through Zoster, Ceos, Gyaros, Syros, and Delos on his flotilla of unsteady Rhodian undecked vessels, prudently slower than the winds would allow, with the Homeric “heights of Gyrae” (the cliffs on which the Lesser Ajax was wrecked, Odyssey 4.500) hanging over his unease. The whole first section is a mariner’s logbook in clipped phrases — island, wind, day — and a connoisseur’s note that nothing is less seaworthy than a Rhodian aphractum.

The second section turns on a piece of news from home: the acquittal of M. Valerius Messalla Rufus, the consul of 53, in a de ambitu trial. Cicero had written to both Atticus and Hortensius the moment he heard at Gyaros, and is now waiting hungrily for letters that explain the politics rather than the bare result — letters politikōteron, “in a more statesmanlike vein,” of a sort Atticus is presumably equipped to write now that he is reading Cicero’s books with the slave-scholar Thallumetus. The Helonius named with a Ciceronian sneer is a cipher of mere news-collecting; what Cicero wants from Atticus is interpretation. The last section returns to the landlord’s chores: the pile of bricks Cicero forgot to answer about, the water-rights on his Tusculan estate, the favour to be done for his son-in-law’s family connection Philippus. The signature line — “as I write, I was literally in the middle of the sea” — is the journey- letters’ joke and apology in one.