Cicero to Atticus, written at Rhodes about the fourth day before the Ides of Sextilis (10 August) 50 BC — the manuscript dateline: Scr. Rhodi circ. iv Id. Sext. a. 704 (50). The province is behind him; he is on the long way home, the boys with him, the etesian winds making the next leg slow. The piece of news that opens the letter is that he has, by arrangement made at Rome in his absence, become father-in-law to Cornelius Dolabella — the man who not long ago prosecuted his predecessor Appius Claudius, whom Cicero is busy “dressing up in every kind of distinction” from the province. Cicero had been negotiating about Tiberius Nero; the women at home settled it the other way before he could intervene. He hopes the marriage will be the better one.

The rest of the letter moves through the business he has not been able to manage from the field. Section 2: the Athenian grain-dole and his unease about Atticus’s part in it; the commission for a propylon at the Academy, set against Appius’s abandoned Eleusinion; the loss of Hortensius (whose death he has only just heard of and feels as a personal injury, since he had meant at last to live with him in close intimacy). Section 3 is the defence of the succession he has had to improvise: not Quintus filius (a boy), not Quintus frater (the cost too high, the popular case too damaging), but Coelius — because the choice as in fact constrained, and because Pompey leaving Quintus Cassius and Caesar leaving Antonius without lot are the precedents he can stand behind. Section 4 is the private case for the same choice: the worry of ever leaving family there, the worry above all of Quintus filius, and at the close the triumph he has begun to want — the palingenesia of a reputation made new in Cilicia, which he tells Atticus to want with him.