Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculan villa on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of Quintilis 46 BC — 15 June (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Tusculano xvii K.\ Quint.\ a.\ 708 (46)). A short two-section letter. 1 opens with relief: Atticus’s letter has restored a festal day, because Tiro had reported him looking flushed (enereuthesteron). Cicero will accordingly add one more day — to his stay at Tusculum, or to whatever the two have been working out.

2 is the substantial half: the long-rumoured Cato. Cicero calls the piece an Archimedean problem — he cannot find a way to write something that Atticus’s dinner-companions, the Caesarian set, could read even with composure. Even if he were to set aside Cato’s political opinions and praise only his gravity and constancy psil\=os, bare-stripped, the result would still be loathsome to them. But the man cannot be honestly praised unless his foresight, his fight against what came, and his suicide to avoid seeing it accomplished are made part of the glory — and none of those will go down with Aledius (the Caesarian channel through whom such pieces apparently reached the regime). The letter closes with a request that Atticus apply to his own recovery the prudence he applies to everything else.