Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the thirteenth day before the Kalends of April 709 AUC — 20 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae xiii K. Apr.\ a.\ 709 (45)). A short, almost entirely business letter, written the day after the substantial 12.23. The first section runs through four items in quick succession: Aulus Silius has settled his affair (which Cicero had been anxious about); Atticus is to close the Ovia matter; the question of supporting young Marcus, now ready to be sent to Athens for his studies, has come up, with Cicero asking whether the funds can be transferred by exchange (permutatio) at Athens or must be carried over in person; and Aledius is to be the source for what Publilius (brother of Cicero’s young second wife) is doing about Africa.

The middle section, opened with a quiet apology — “to return to my own trifles” — returns to the same antiquarian errand as 12.22.2: Cicero is checking, against his own memory, whether particular sons predeceased their fathers (Publius Crassus, son of Venuleia and the ex-consul; Regillus, son of Lepidus). These are family-by-family exempla for the consolation work in progress that takes the death of a child as its subject. The brief third section closes out three further errands (Cispius, Precius, Attica) and sends greetings to Atticus’s daughter and wife. The whole letter is practical and even-toned; the grief that fills 12.23 is present only by inference, in the very fact that the consolation work for which the exempla are being gathered is for himself.