Cicero to Atticus, written from the Cuman villa on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of June 49 BC — 16 May (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Cumano xvii K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 705 (49)). The letter is a short operational dispatch in four brief sections, written while the household is still preparing the crossing that has been hanging fire since the start of the month. Hortensius the younger, governor of the neighbouring coast, has called on Cicero on the day before the Ides (14 May) — with a letter to him already written, an awkward fact Cicero notes in passing — and is being extravagantly obliging, an [Greek: ekten\=eian], “devotion,” that Cicero plainly means to spend. Atticus’s freedman Serapion has come in close behind with a letter that confirms what Cicero already knew about him from an earlier note: learned and honest, and worth keeping. Cicero now means to take the ship he sails on, and Serapion himself as fellow-passenger.

The rest is brief housekeeping. The eye trouble (lippitudo) keeps flaring up just enough to slow Cicero’s writing; he is glad to hear Atticus is finally clear of his old illness and the new bouts that followed it. He wishes Ocella were here, and notes that the chief obstacle now is the equinox, which has run rough; if it settles, he hopes Hortensius continues as generous as he has been. Section 4 answers a small note of pique from Atticus: Cicero had assumed that Atticus held an imperial diploma (an official travel-warrant of the kind a magistrate issued to authorise the use of the cursus publicus), partly because Atticus had spoken of travel and partly because he had drawn one out for his slaves; Cicero says so and asks for any further news, however small. The letter closes with a dateline of its own: xvii K.\ Iun., 16 May. Two daggered cruxes in the manuscript (one in 1, one in 3) are preserved in this translation as \ markers; the sense given is the most natural reading of the corrupted text.