Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on the third day before the Kalends of June 709 AUC — 30 May 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Tusculano iii K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 709 (45)). A week after 13.01, and back wholly on the business of the gardens: Atticus has reported on the available nomina — the assigned-debt claims that Cicero proposes to use as payment instruments — and Cicero accepts them, with only mild reproach for Atticus’s hedging. The voice is the comfortable shop-talk of two old men who have been doing each other’s accounts for thirty years: “if I were managing my own affair, I should manage nothing except by your advice.” Caelius’s nomen is out (Atticus does not approve it); the rest are in.

The second section turns to the personal business that always sits alongside the financial. Crispus and Mustela — the two partners holding shares in the property — need to be coordinated; the share each holds is something Cicero would like fixed. And Brutus is on his way back from Cisalpina, the news already brought by Aegypta, the freedman courier, whose letter Cicero is forwarding to Atticus because it was, he says, commode scripta — “conveniently” put. The textual crux at $$espraes$$ in section 1 (perhaps ex praesenti, “out of ready money”) leaves the precise mechanism of payment in shadow; the direction of the negotiation, however, is plain.