Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the eleventh day before the Kalends of April 709 AUC — 22 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae xi K. Apr.\ a.\ 709 (45)). A short letter focused on the gardens negotiation, two days after 12.24. Sicca has written to Cicero about Silius’s property and reports that the matter has been referred to Atticus; Cicero is pleased with the property and the terms, but wants the price in cash rather than in kind, since he can barely live off the income-bearing properties he already has. He works through the financing aloud — six hundred thousand sesterces to be pressed out of Hermogenes, six hundred thousand he sees lying at home, the remainder to be carried on interest until Faberius or one of Faberius’s debtors can settle.

The second section is briefer and more revealing. Drusus’s gardens, Cicero says, he prefers much more than Silius’s — the two are not even comparable. One thing only moves him in the matter, and in it he knows he is infatuated (tetyphōsthai, a Stoic-Cynic term for being puffed up by vanity); but he asks Atticus to indulge this delusion of his. As for what Atticus has written about something to grow old with (engērama) — a quiet philosophical counsel, that he should choose a property for the long quiet years ahead — Cicero answers flatly: that matter is over (his daughter being dead, those long years no longer interest him), and he is seeking other things. The two Greek words carry the whole weight: Atticus tactfully naming what the search is properly for; Cicero answering that he knows his motive is irrational, and asking that it be indulged anyway.