Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the seventh day before the Ides of May 709 AUC — 9 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae vii Id.\ Mai.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The longest and most defensive letter of the early-May cluster. Hirtius has sent Cicero a draft attack on Cato that flatters Cicero himself with “the greatest praises”; Caesar’s own Anticato is in preparation, and Cicero treats Hirtius’ piece as a useful preview. He has the book copied at once through Musca and Atticus’ copyists — he wants it “widely circulated.”

The middle of the letter is the answer to a question Atticus had raised: that Cicero’s standing (gratia and auctoritas) may be suffering from his prolonged maeror. Cicero flares back: what is he supposed to do — not grieve? not lie low? At the same time he registers, in a single line, the failed symbouleutikon, the political-advisory tract addressed to Caesar in the manner of Aristotle’s and Theopompus’ letters to Alexander — [Greek: sumbouleutikon], [Greek: Aristotelous], [Greek: Theopompou pros Alexandron]. He cannot find the shape of it: those Greeks wrote what was honourable to themselves and pleasing to Alexander, and the parallel will not bear weight. The catalogue of his recent productivity that follows — thirty days at the gardens, no visitor turned away, the people with him finding leisure harder to bear than he the labour — is one of the strongest defences of his grief-work in the whole sequence.

Section 3 turns the question outward: he is not in Rome because it is the court recess (discessus); not at his seasonal estates because he could not bear the frequentia — a different word from the celebritas of the fanum project, but the same vocabulary of crowds. The closing remark on the lost hilaritas “with which I used to season this bitter time” is the most explicit acknowledgment that the man who returns to Rome will not be the man who left it. Sections 4–5 are pure business: the Scapula gardens (still the favoured site for the shrine) are to be put up by the auctioneer through joint pressure; the daggered crux \ non est in eo\ over Lentulus is preserved.