Ad Atticum 10.13

Cicero to Atticus, written from the Cuman villa on the Nones of May 49 BC — 7 May (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Cumano Non. Mai. a. 705 (49)). Atticus’s reply has arrived and lifted Tullia’s spirits, and Cicero’s; he asks Atticus to keep writing and not to let anything that points to hope slip past. Then comes the sardonic centerpiece of the letter: do not be frightened by Antony’s lions (Antony was famous for keeping a yoke of lions in his carriage at this period); “there is nothing more agreeable than the man.” Cicero proceeds to give Atticus a sample of a “statesman’s policy” ([Greek: praxin politikou]) at work: Antony summoned the ten leading men and the boards of four from the surrounding municipalities; they came at dawn to his villa; Antony slept till the third hour; then, when told the Neapolitans and Cumans were there (the towns Caesar is angry with), he sent them away till the next day — he wanted a bath, and so on. Today he is crossing to Aenaria (Ischia) to promise the exiles their return. The mockery is bone-dry.

Section 2 turns to housekeeping — letters from Axius, thanks for news of Tiro, the banker Vettienus, the repayment to Vestorius, Servius Sulpicius’s expected arrival the next morning from Minturnae via the Liternum estate of C. Marcellus — and to the single thing that astonishes Cicero: Antony, who has been particularly attentive in the past, has not even sent him a messenger. Plainly the brief about Cicero is harsher than expected; Antony does not want to refuse him to his face. Section 3 returns to Spain — the hinge of everything — and to Atticus’s own constraints (Silius, Ocella and the rest are held back; even Atticus is held up by Curio). The closing word is a Greek crux preserved daggered in the manuscripts as [Greek: EKITAONON] — nonsense as it stands; the editors mark it with $$ and leave it, and so does this translation.