Cicero to Atticus, dashed off from Tralles in inland Lydia on 27 July 51 BC (a.d. vi K. Sext.) as the proconsul drives east through the heat of an Asian high summer to take up his Cilician command. The letter is exactly what its closing line calls it — a note “full of haste and dust.” Cicero is on the road, dictating from the carriage, and apologizes in the opening line for the brevity and for not writing in his own hand. He had posted from Ephesus the day before; he expects to cross his provincial frontier on the Kalends of August, and asks Atticus from that date to start “the year-calendar” (the Greek parap\=egma eniausion) — the running count of his twelve months of imperium, since the whole governorship was conceded only on condition that it would not be prorogued.

The news he reports from the road is, for once, all good: the Parthian frontier is quiet, the publicans’ tax contracts in Asia have been concluded, and a mutiny in the legions has been suppressed by his predecessor Appius Claudius Pulcher, with full back-pay made good through the Ides of July. He confirms his plan to head straight to the army for the summer months and reserve the winter for the assize-circuit. The closing request — that Atticus write him “everything that is, everything that is to be,” and above all attend to the endomychon, the “inmost matter” which most editors take to be the marriage of Tullia — shows how completely his domestic anxieties travel east with him.