Cicero to Atticus, written on the march in Cilicia just after the Nones of June (5 June) 50 BC — the manuscript dateline: Scr. in itinere paulo post Non. Iun. a. 704 (50). A short, hurried note written between halts as he comes down toward Tarsus to close out his proconsular year. Atticus is by now back at Rome; the letter is the first of the journey sequence in which Cicero, no longer master of his time, keeps reaching for his correspondent through the disordered intervals of a march.

Two anxieties run through the two sections. The first is administrative and political: who will hold Cilicia when Cicero lays it down. The senatorial ruling that someone must be left in charge forces a choice between an inadequate quaestor (Mescinius), a Coelius from whom no news has come, and brother Quintus — the last preferred but freighted with the costs of a separation and a war. The second is private and confidential: Tullia’s marriage (already settled with Terentia in Atticus’s absence and now requiring his oversight), Cicero’s own honor — the supplicatio and the official despatch he needs Atticus to have steered through the Senate — and, in a deliberately encrypted passage in Greek, what looks to be a defalcation by Terentia’s freedman in the matter of property purchases. He cannot say more in writing; the request is that Atticus, with his usual nose, should follow the scent.