Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the Nones of March 709 AUC — 7 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae Non.\ Mart.\ a.\ 709 (45)). This is the first of the day-by-day notes from Atticus’s seaside villa at Astura, to which Cicero had withdrawn a few weeks after the death of his daughter Tullia in mid-February. The letter is short, two sections, and sets the keynote for the sequence: a moment of concern for Atticus’s daughter Attica (under the care of the physician Craterus), an acknowledgement that Brutus has written shrewdly and kindly, and then the controlling sentence — me haec solitudo minus stimulat quam ista celebritas — “this solitude of mine pricks me less than that crowded life with you.”

The second section turns to small business. The augur Appuleius is requiring the regular oath of attendance from his fellow-augurs; Cicero asks Atticus to keep getting him excused on grounds of illness — day by day — through Septimius, Statilius, and the others, since Laenas had undertaken the matter. If it gets harder, Cicero will come and swear out his own “perpetual illness”: better, he says, to seem to shun dinner-parties by law than by grief. The letter closes with the first appearance in the Astura sequence of the property-hunt that will run through the rest of the year: Cocceius is not keeping a promise, and Cicero wants to buy “some hiding-place, some refuge from my grief.”