Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of June 709 AUC — 17 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Tusculano xvi K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 709 (45)). The first letter of the sequence written from the Tusculanum: Cicero has at last moved out of Astura, going by way of Lanuvium as he had announced over the preceding days. The change of place is also a change of register — shorter, more outward-looking, more concerned with the news from Atticus’ household and the literary politics of the Cato-and-anti-Cato controversy. The opening note on Attica is brief relief; the report of Atticus’ own [Greek: ak\=edia] — a Greek term that Cicero will not translate, a listless indifference that is the elder Atticus’ counterpart to Cicero’s grief — shows that the move closer to Rome was, in part, for Atticus.

The middle sentence is the sequence’s quietest admission about what Astura had been worth: ceteroqui ἀνεκτότερα erant Asturae, “otherwise things were more bearable at Astura.” The Tusculanum is the right move, but it is not the easier place; what made Astura possible was its distance. The aside on Caesar as a neighbour — “I would rather have him share a temple with Quirinus than with Salus” — is a sharp dark joke, all the sharper for being delivered in passing. The deified Romulus was murdered by the senators of tradition; the implication, that the dictator might join him in that fashion, is the kind of thing Cicero now risks committing to a letter. The close turns again to Hirtius’ anti-Cato pamphlet: spread it, by all means, so that the praise of the talent is heard while the theme [Greek: hypothesis] is laughed off.