Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of April 709 AUC — 18 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae xv K. Apr.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The letter divides sharply into three small business compartments. The opening turn is on Terentia: Atticus has tried to lay the whole burden of the dowry-and-divorce negotiations on Cicero, and Cicero gently pushes back — these are the wounds he cannot handle without groaning — asking only that Atticus moderate things as far as he can. The middle section is a curious antiquarian errand for the philosophical work in progress: Cicero wants to know whether Rutilia outlived her son, and whether Clodia outlived hers (the ex-consul Decimus Brutus), and names the people who would know.

The third and longest section returns to the horti — the search for a suburban garden estate to house Tullia’s shrine. Drusus’s are the readiest (the owner is keen to sell), Lamia’s come next but the owner is out of town, and Silius’s lie unused and could carry their own interest. Cicero sets out the financing in plain practical terms: he can sell some assets easily, but would rather not, and proposes paying the seller interest for a year while the purchase comes together. He closes with a line worth marking — the project is to be weighed not by what his finances will bear, of which he takes no care, but “by what I want and why I want it.” The daggered crux at iis\ usuris is preserved at the obelus; the sense followed is the most natural reading (“those interest payments”).