Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on the thirteenth day before the Kalends of June 709 AUC — 20 May 45 BC. The Perseus dateline as printed reads Scr.\ in Tusculano xiii K.\ luit.\ a.\ 709 (45), where “luit.”\ is an obvious OCR garble for “Iun.”: the surrounding letters (12.52 = xii K.\ Iun., 12.53 = xi K.\ Iun.) fix the month. Atticus has been gone two days; the household at the Tusculanum is filling up again — Tiro is back, Nicias is back, Valerius is expected — and the opening line stretches the cluster’s loneliness to its sharpest formulation: quamvis multi sint, magis tamen ero solus quam si unus esses, “many as they may be, I shall be more alone than I would be if you were the only one with me.”

The substance is the long-meditated letter to Caesar that has hung over the spring. Atticus has now endorsed sending it; Cicero, relieved, says he too came round most of all because the letter contains nothing but what befits an optimus civis — qualified at once, in the antithesis he cannot help making, with sed ita optimi ut tempora, “the best, however, that the times allow.” The Caesarian intermediaries (Balbus and Oppius, named in the adjacent letters) are to read it first; if their approval is feigned rather than felt, the letter is not to be sent — mihi simulatio pro repudiatione fuerit, with the surgical Greek tag [Greek: touto de m\=el\=os\=ei], “probe this” (from m\=elo\=o, to sound a wound with a probe). The last section turns to the Caerellia debt, which Atticus prefers Cicero settle by assignment rather than carry openly; payment is to be deferred till they know how things stand with the collectors Meto and Faberius.