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.