Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the eighth day before the Ides of March 709 AUC — 8 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae viii Id.\ Mart.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The second of the Astura day-letters. The first two sections are routine: a continuation of yesterday’s business with the augur Appuleius (Septimius, Laenas, and Statilius are the three names needed for the proxy oath), and a query about an old guarantee for Cornificius that the lawyer Junius has revived.

The third section is the heart of the letter and the most important sentence in the early Astura sequence: feci quod profecto ante me nemo ut ipse me per litteras consolarer. Cicero says he has done what surely no one before him has done — consoled himself, in his own person, by writing — and will send the book (the lost Consolatio) to Atticus once the copyists have made it out. He adds the bleak rider that no consolation is of its kind: he writes whole days not to make progress but to be held back briefly from the force of grief, and he strives, he says, not to repair his mind so much as his face. The closing of the section — perierunt illa quae amabas, “what you loved is gone” — is plain and unornamented in the Latin and is kept so in the English. The fourth section returns to news: Brutus’s letter helps in nothing, but he wishes Brutus would come; he asks when Pansa will set out; he grieves at Attica’s illness, trusts Craterus, and tells Pilia not to be in anguish — “it is enough that I mourn for all.”