Cicero to Atticus, written perhaps from Sicca’s suburban estate near Rome on the evening of the Kalends of May, or the morning of the sixth day before the Nones of May, 709 AUC — 1 or 2 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ fort.\ in suburbano Siccae K.\ vesp.\ aut mane vi Non.\ Mai.\ a.\ 709 (45)). A very short letter, one section only. Cicero has discovered — only after his last conversation with Atticus — that the Lex Julia on funerals imposes a matching payment to the people for any sum laid out on a monument above the legal limit. This affects everything: if the fanum is to be a shrine in name as well as function, the site of the Drusi or Scapula gardens may not work, and a new site may be needed.

The Greek aside [Greek: alog\=os], “unreasonably,” is one of Cicero’s most revealing self-corrections in the sequence: he knows that his insistence on the word fanum — on shrine rather than tomb or monument — is not a rational position. It is the position the grief will not let go of. The closing appeal — “embrace this thought with your whole heart” — is a characteristic Astura hyperbole, the same intensity turned now on a question of site and statute rather than of grief itself. The letter shows the Consolatio has done some work (“less hard pressed,” prope modum conlegi, “nearly got myself in hand again”), but the obsession with the shrine continues.