Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the day before the Nones of May 709 AUC — 6 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae prid.\ Non.\ Mai.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The first section is the shortest possible note: a courier has come back without a letter, presumably because Atticus was too busy, and Cicero forgives the silence in advance. The phrase nihil equidem levor sed tamen aberro catches the precise temperature of the Astura days — writing brings no relief, only a kind of turning aside from himself.

The second section is darker. Asinius Pollio has written about an impurus cognatus — “our impure kinsman,” the standard reading being Cicero’s nephew Quintus the younger, whose conduct has been a running source of family scandal. Balbus the younger had hinted at it; Dolabella had spoken obscurely; Pollio has spelled it out. Cicero refuses to give the matter room for nova aegrimonia, “fresh sorrow” — the Tullia wound is the only one this spring has any space for — and breaks off mid-sentence (quamquam mihi quidem—) with the Stoic injunction tenendus dolor est, “the pain must be held in.” The grief vocabulary of the cluster (dolor, maeror) is now being extended to second-order sorrows the writer will not allow himself.