Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of April 709 AUC — 19 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae xiv K. Apr.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The longest of the late-March Astura letters, opening with one of the sharpest grief-sentences in the cluster: “We are finished, finished, Atticus — finished long since, in fact, but only now confessing it, since we have lost the one thing that held us.” Atticus’s letter, whose opening had led Cicero to expect news from Spain (where Caesar was finishing the war against the Pompeian remnant), had instead answered Cicero’s own letter as if Forum and Curia were where life was lived; Cicero protests that with the Forum gone the household itself is no comfort, and resolves — if any business takes him back to town — to let no one perceive his grief, not even Atticus if he can help it. The mention of Aledius’s earlier enquiry suggests that intrusive condolence-callers were already a known nuisance in town.

The second section turns to the philosophical work in progress, in which Cicero is reaching for material on second-century Athenian intellectual life. He has been working through Atticus’s Liber Annalis; he wants to know under which consuls Carneades and the Academic embassy of 155 BC came to Rome (the embassy whose business, he thinks but is not sure, was the Oropus dispute), what the points of contention were, and who at that time held the Epicurean Garden at Athens and who counted as the distinguished statesmen (politikoi) of the city — material, he suggests, that Apollodorus would also have. The single Greek word (politikoi) is technical; it marks the philosophical register breaking into the practical letter. The third section returns to the gardens search and ranges over the financing in confidential detail: Drusus’s price, Lucius Cotta’s small Ostian plot as a fallback if the Transtiberine properties fail, a charge to Sicca to approach Silius. The governing line is plain: “I no longer need silver or fine clothes or pleasant retreats of any kind; this is what I need.” That is the shrine for Tullia, by this date the steady anchor of Cicero’s letters.