Cicero to Atticus, written in camp on the fifth day before the Kalends of Quintilis (27 June) 50 BC — the manuscript dateline: Scr. in castris v K. Quint. a. 704 (50). Thirty-three days remain of the proconsular year. Syria is in flames; Bibulus, in the personal grief of his sons’ murder, is shouldering the heaviest part of the Parthian war; Cicero, with a weak army of legionaries and good Galatian, Pisidian, and Lycian auxiliaries, is keeping his forces as close to the enemy as the law of the decree allows. The question that will not let him sleep is who takes Cilicia after him. The senate’s failure to nominate a successor — the leitmotif of late Ad Atticum 6 — raises the spectre of a second year in the province, the thing he has feared from the moment he came out.

The letter is short and uncharacteristically constrained: he says at the end he wanted to write more, but had nothing else to say and was too anxious to jest. Section 1 picks up the encrypted business of 6.4 — Terentia’s freedman and what Cicero suspects of him — and asks Atticus to dig further. Section 2 runs that cipher openly: a long Greek-script passage, half ledger half proverb, on what looks to be the Scaptius / Brutus money in Salaminian Cyprus (the debt-figures in minae, the second-month interest, the recriminations of an agent who has come up to camp, played the suppliant, and gone away muttering quotations from Homer and proverb when he failed to get what he wanted). Section 3 is the procuratorial heart: the day of decessio creeping up le-le-thotos, the allo problema of whom to put in charge if Caldus does not arrive in time. Section 4 closes with the apology — no jesting today — and the family greetings.