Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the third day before the Ides of May 709 AUC — 13 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Asturae iii Id.\ Mai.\ a.\ 709 (45)). One of the more densely textured letters of the Astura sequence, moving from literary politics to estate-buying to the daily war news to the philosophical writing that is the actual work of these months. Cicero received Hirtius’ anti-Cato pamphlet — a piece of Caesarian propaganda answering his own Cato of the previous year — and has decided to have it circulated through Atticus’ copying-shop: the worse Hirtius’ attack, the louder the praise of Cato will sound. The opening play on humane (kindly, in the human manner) — Hirtius writes sympathetically to Atticus, Atticus does not forward the letter to Cicero, and each is praised for the deeper humanity of his act — is one of the small moments of warmth that survive in the grief sequence.

The second section is the estate search, now running through the freedman Mustela: the access needed is simply legal access for a buyer, which any heir can provide. The Greek vocabulary turns explicitly to what the estate is for — [Greek: eng\=erama], a place to grow old in; [Greek: oikodespotika], befitting a householder. Otho first, then Clodia; failing that, Drusus must be played along (Druso ludus est suggerendus) or the Tusculanum used. The third section turns to the war: Philotimus brings news that Pompey the Younger has not been pinned at Carteia and that a substantial war remains, but Cicero is sceptical — the informant is a regular little Fulvinius, the proverbial false-news pedlar. The final section is the one that gives the sequence its second arc beneath the grief: Cicero has finished two great treatises [Greek: syntagmata] at Astura, “for in no other way can I, so to speak, stray from my misery.” This is the Consolatio alongside another work, probably the lost Hortensius, taking shape as the medicine and the distraction at once.