Cicero to Atticus, written from Athens on the Ides of October 50 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Athenis Id. Oct. a. 704 (50)). Cicero landed at the Piraeus on the 14th, picked up Atticus’s letter from his slave Acastus at once, and on the following day wrote this reply: the last letter of Ad Atticum book 6, sent off just before he sails for Italy. By the time it lands in Rome Caesar has crossed the Rubicon four months later; the world the letter belongs to will have ended. He does not yet know that, but the alarm is in every paragraph.

Section 1 opens with what he can read in the physical packet itself: the seal short, the hand disordered (sunchusin tōn grammatōn, “confusion of the little letters”) — and at the close the explanation, that Atticus had reached Rome with a fever. The diagnostic is loving and exact and ends in the trust that good sense and self-discipline will have the upper hand. Section 2 turns to a piece of domestic management — a legacy a certain manipulative party is not to be allowed to touch — wrapped in dense Greek (paraphylaxon, philotimian, autotata, kenon, atyphon) of the kind Cicero uses with Atticus only. Section 3 is the running argument about the nephew Quintus: Atticus had urged that the boy not be left behind in the province, and had registered his broader judgement about the handover to brother Quintus under the verb epechein, “to suspend judgement.” Cicero, having now done both, reads the suspension as in fact a rejection (athetēsis) rather than a withholding (epochē) and is amused, and grateful, that they reached the same conclusion as though they had talked it out. Section 4 closes with the homecoming checklist: a letter from Atticus to follow him on Tullia’s marriage to Dolabella, on the censors, on the question of the statues and pictures and whether the matter is to be raised — and the cold news he is recording as he writes, quo die, ut scribis, Caesar Placentiam legiones IIII, “on which day, as you write, Caesar reaches Placentia with four legions.” The next clause is the one he says aloud: quaeso, quid nobis futurum est? “I ask you, what is to become of us?” The very last sentence is a half-jest, half-prayer — his station now, he says, is the citadel at Athens.