Cicero to Atticus, written at Tarsus before the third day before the Kalends of Sextilis (before 30 July) 50 BC — the manuscript dateline: Scr. Tarsi ante iii K. Sext. a. 704 (50). A short note from the end of the province. The succession question of 6.5 has resolved itself for now (the next letter, 6.6, will spell out that the command has been left to Coelius); the road home is being laid out — the quaestor Mescinius to be met at Laodicea for the legal deposit of the accounts under the lex Iulia, then Rhodes for the sake of the boys, then Athens as soon as the etesians let him sail.

Two private threads come into the open. The first is family: Quintus the younger, after much prompting and pressing on a heart that was running of its own accord, has brought his father back to Atticus’s sister Pomponia — the difficult marriage that has been a worry all through book 5 and book 6. The second is the cipher of 6.4 and 6.5 made articulate at last: a request that Atticus look into Milo’s debts and hold him to a promise he had given. The letter closes on Tiro, left gravely ill at Issus and now reported to be better — a worry Cicero will not let himself put down, because there is no more chaste and diligent young man in his household.