Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on the Kalends of June 709 AUC — 1 June 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Tusculano K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 709 (45)). A short note that braids together the three preoccupations of this Tusculan fortnight: the historical scaffolding of the Academica (the ten legates sent out after the destruction of Corinth in 146, with whom Cicero needs to populate his dialogue’s antiquarian backdrop), the slow accounting of the Terentia dowry repayment (the nomina owed by Piso and Avius), and the visit of Brutus that everything is being arranged around.

The first line — “I have the gift you worked up for me on the ten legates” — thanks Atticus for the kind of antiquarian service-work he performs for Cicero throughout this spring: digging out the names from his prosopographical files so the dialogue can be set in the right year with the right cast. The Tuditanus remark fixes a date: if the son was quaestor a year after Mummius’s consulship (146 BC), the father cannot have been among the legates. The repeated placet on the debts is half exasperation, half formula — Atticus keeps asking for direction, Cicero keeps giving the same one — and the close (“send a boy to find out” when Brutus will arrive) is the standard country-house choreography of these weeks.