Cicero to Atticus, written from the Cumaean villa on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of May 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Cumano xv K. Mai.\ a.\ 705 (49)). The letter is a short pendant to 10.4: it reports the second day of conversation with Curio (which “came to roughly the same total” but with more candour about the prospect of any outcome at all), and returns, briefly and almost in passing, to the wound that governs the preceding letter — Atticus’s charge to him to get the younger Quintus in hand. Cicero answers with the old Greek proverb, “you are asking Arcadia of me” ([Greek: Arkadian], from Arkadian m’ aiteis, an idiom for being asked the impossible), and breaks off the thought with a half-sentence (atque utinam tu—) before deciding not to be more troublesome.

Section 3 turns wholly domestic: a small property transaction with one Vettienus, conducted through Philotimus, whose negligence in the original report had annoyed Cicero, and which Vettienus has now resolved on more generous terms than first communicated. The letter closes by asking Atticus when he himself plans to travel, and is signed off with the dateline. There is one Greek word: Ἀρκαδίαν (Arkadian).