Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of June 709 AUC — 19 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Tusculano xiv K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 709 (45)). Atticus has come and gone; the visit promised at the close of 12.46 happened the day before, and the absence is felt at once. The first section is the small, exact line that names the cluster’s reversal of solitudo into something worse: he felt the company while he had it, he feels it more now that it is gone.

The middle section is a sudden window onto the wider Caesarian Rome. A young Gaius Marius — great-grandson of the consul, grandson of L. Crassus the orator — petitions Cicero through every line of inherited dignity to take a case for him; Cicero declines on the realistic ground that the whole potestas now sits with Caesar, and refers him there with a polite compliment to Caesar’s generosity. The exclamation that follows — o tempora! fore cum dubitet Curtius consulatum petere! — registers the strangeness of a world in which a man like Curtius might hesitate to stand for the consulship at all. The closing section returns to the inner circle: Tiro’s illness, a letter forwarded to young Cicero in Athens, and a request for the auction date of the gardens.