Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the Ides of March 709 AUC — 15 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae Id.\ Mart.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The shortest letter of the cluster, written the day after 12.19. Atticus had evidently passed on advice that Cicero ought to dissemble the depth of his mourning; Cicero answers that whole days spent in reading and writing are themselves the dissembling, even if his real purpose is to soothe and heal his own mind, and even if the headway he makes with himself is slight.

The second section is the practical counterpart to that work. He wants two pieces of prosopographical information for the book he has been writing on the lessening of grief (almost certainly the lost Consolatio): did Gnaeus Caepio perish at sea while his father was still living, or after his father’s death? Did Rutilia die before or after her son Gaius Cotta? The arrangement of the question — two near-identical binary inquiries, drawn from the same generation of consular families — shows the kind of exempla-collection that lies behind the lost treatise.