Cicero to Atticus, written at Ephesus on 26 July 51 BC (the sixth day before the Kalends of August), four days after his landing in the province. The opening sentence gives the journey-letters’ precise milestone: arrival on 22 July, “the five hundred and sixtieth day after the battle of Bovillae” — the clash on the Appian Way in January 52 in which Milo’s slaves killed Clodius, and from which Cicero dates his exile from Roman politics. The voyage from Delos has been without fear or seasickness but slow, because the Rhodian flotilla is what it is. At Samos and then in greater force at Ephesus the proconsul has been met by embassies, private petitioners, and an “unbelievable throng”; the tax-farming publicani already treat him as their imperator, the Greek provincials as a returning praetor of Ephesus. After many years of ornamental rhetoric on integrity in provincial government, Cicero is now on trial against his own ostentationes, his showpieces.

The second section is one of Cicero’s running services to Atticus, this time in Atticus’s business interests in the province of Asia (governed by Q. Minucius Thermus): Cicero has commended Atticus’s freedman Philogenes and another agent named Seius to Thermus, along with Xeno of Apollonis, and has settled an exchange-of-currency account. The third section turns home, and back to the journey-letters’ refrain: ut simus annui, that the Cilician year be only a year, and that no intercalary month be allowed to extend it. Then the cluster of commissions: the “domestic worry” is generally read as Tullia’s marriage prospects, on which Cicero and Atticus have been corresponding; the “Caesar” business is Cicero’s pending loan from him — begun at Atticus’s prompting and, the proconsul hastily adds, not yet regretted; the trials, the water-rights at Tusculum, Philippus the family connection: the same anxious agenda that will recur through the year.