Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the seventh day before the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano vii K. Mart. a. 705 (49)). A short domestic dispatch sandwiched between the war bulletins. Dionysius the Greek tutor — already a running irritant in this stretch of the correspondence — had stormed off in one of his furies; Cicero had written a sharp letter and bundled it into the packet to Atticus; the same evening Dionysius himself turned up, calmed (Cicero supposes) by Atticus’s intervention. Now Cicero scrambles to intercept the sharp letter before it reaches the man it was written about, dispatching his body-slave Pollex to Rome on that errand alone.

The Greek quotation in section 1, [Greek: polla matēn keraessin es ēera thymēnanta] — “raging to no purpose, tossing his horns into the air” — is from the bull-simile of Iliad 17.430, the Trojan horses standing over the body of Patroclus. Section 2 turns to the strategic question that is swallowing everything: the news from Corfinium, in qua de salute rei publicae decernetur — “in which the safety of the commonwealth will be decided.” The closing favour is the standard end-of-letter housekeeping: a packet to be forwarded to M’. Curius, and a word of recommendation for Tiro, still in fragile health and travelling on borrowed expense-money.