Cicero to Atticus, written from Laodicea on the third day before the Nones of August (3 August) 51 BC, two days after his arrival at the capital of the conventus on 31 July. He notes the date as the start of the year’s count — the year of imperium he is determined will not be extended — and immediately admits what governing this provincial backwater feels like to a man whose horses are still bred for Rome: the field is too small for him, his “splendid work goes to waste,” he is judging cases at Laodicea while A. Plotius judges them in the Forum, and he holds the name only of two skeleton legions while Pompey (“our friend”) has armies enormous in the comparison. The list of what he misses — daylight, Forum, City, his house, Atticus himself — is one of the most economical homesicknesses in the correspondence.

The second paragraph turns to expenses and to the running joke of the trip. Cicero is being scrupulously abstinent by Atticus’s precepts — so abstinent, he says, that the loan he got from Atticus on exchange may have to be repaid by a fresh loan; the wounds Appius Claudius left in the province are visible everywhere, though Cicero is decent enough not to pull them open. He is on the march from Laodicea into Lycaonia, on toward Taurus, where he intends, with mock-military pomp, to fight a pitched battle with one Moeragenes over a runaway slave of Atticus’s. The Latin slips into the iambic of an old proverb, “the pack-saddle on the ox is set” — a soldier’s load fastened on a beast born for the plough — which is exactly how the governorship feels. The closing instructions on the postal route, through the masters of pasturage-dues and harbour-dues of the publicans, show how the tax-farmers’ infrastructure carried the orator’s letters home.