Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on the ninth day before the Kalends of June 709 AUC — 24 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Tusculano ix K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 709 (45)). A scrap of a letter — one sentence and a broken-off second — thanking Atticus for the speed of some report whose substance we cannot recover. What the matter was, the manuscript leaves blank: a rumour, an insult, a piece of Caesarian high-handed news. “What could be more outrageous?” he writes, and then at once the lifelong reflex of the cluster takes over: “by now we have grown hard to such things, and have stripped off all humanity” — iam ad ista obduruimus et humanitatem omnem exuimus. The note breaks off in mid-thought (verum tamen—), and may always have been a fragment, or the lost continuation may have been the small daily report he would have crossed out himself the next morning.