Cicero to Atticus, scribbled on the road somewhere between Synnada and Philomelium in inland Phrygia in mid-August 51 BC — the Perseus dateline places the writing between the fifth and third days before the Ides of August. Cicero has stopped on the roadside (“I sat down on the very road”) to hand a letter to the publicans’ departing couriers and to discharge his obligation to Atticus, who has asked for news. The opening section is a deliberate apology for brevity; what follows is anything but slight.

The body of the letter is the first sustained indictment in the correspondence of the state in which Appius Claudius Pulcher has left the province. Cicero has now held three successive assize-sessions — three days at Laodicea, three at Apamea, three at Synnada — and the report from each is identical: the poll-tax (epikephalaia) cannot be paid; the cities’ rights of revenue (\=onas) have been sold off in advance; “the groans, the weeping of the cities” make of the prior governorship not a man’s work but “a sort of monstrousness, of some savage beast.” Against this, Cicero sets the discipline of his own retinue: no hay, no firewood, no roof beyond what each man brings; for the most part they sleep in tents, and “the people revive at our coming.” The closing section flicks at Appius’s flight ahead of him to Tarsus (the furthest corner of the province), repeats the rumour — still just a rumour — that Roman cavalry have been cut up by the Parthians, and remarks dryly that Bibulus, the new governor of neighbouring Syria, is dawdling in order to leave the later. The march is now three days from the army camp.