Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the ninth day before the Kalends of April 709 AUC — 24 March 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae ix K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The first section continues the Silius negotiation: Sicca, now arrived, has added nothing to what his letter already said. Cicero authorises Atticus to involve his son in the transaction if it serves the boy’s interest; for Cicero himself nothing matters in the deal except the one thing Atticus already knows — the shrine for Tullia.

The second section is the philosophical centre of the letter and the most quoted line of the Astura sequence. Atticus has urged him back to his consuetudo — his old habit of life. Cicero refuses, with a distinction that the Consolatio he has been writing for himself has not blurred but sharpened: “I have lessened my grief; my pain I neither could lessen, nor, if I could, would I wish to.” The distinction between maeror (the public, performable mourning) and dolor (the inward pain) is Stoic in its precision and deliberate in its refusal. The third section returns to the practical: condolences for Triarius and the guardianship of his children, the Castricius slave-transaction (with a daggered crux at †ei†, here preserved), and the unresolved question of when and how Publilius is sailing — whether by the equinox or by way of Sicily. The closing instruction to look in on “the boy Lentulus” shows how the household administration continues underneath the grief.