Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the fifth day before the Ides of May 709 AUC — 11 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae v Id.\ Mai.\ a.\ 709 (45)). Section 1 is logistical: Cicero has fixed his itinerary, day after the Ides at Lanuvium, then on to the Tusculanum or to Rome. The Latin transmits sections 1, 2 and 4 only — there is no section 3 in the Perseus text — and the numbering is preserved as the editorial tradition gives it.

Section 2 is one of the most exposed moments in the cluster. Cicero opens with a Greek tag, [Greek: philaition sumphora] — “misfortune is a great fault-finder” — to forgive in advance the unfairness of the pressure he is about to apply: unless he sees the fanum actually being built (not even completed), his dolor will rush upon Atticus, unjustly. The ranked list of sites that follows — first Scapula’s, then Clodia’s, then Cusinius’ and Trebonius’ if Silius refuses and Drusus deals unfairly — is the most explicit prioritisation in the whole estate-search. The closing self-correction is harder still: “you, who now accuse me even more sharply than your usual gentleness can support, but you do it from the deepest love and, perhaps, overborne by my own fault.” The shrine is now described as summa levatio vel ... una: the supreme relief, or in truth the only one. The cluster’s grief register (dolor, levari) is now bound directly to the shrine project — the building has become the only viable form of consolation.

Section 4 returns to Hirtius’ draft of the anti-Cato. Cicero now names it: a [Greek: proplasma], a preliminary plaster sketch of the attack Caesar is preparing. The letter closes with a striking ethical conditional: unless the shrine is finished this summer, “I shall not consider myself freed of the crime” — the scelus being, presumably, a debt of piety to Tullia still unpaid.