Cicero to Atticus, written from his Arpinum estate on the second or third of July 709 AUC — the Perseus dateline reads vi aut v Non.\ Quint.\ a.\ 709 (45), leaving the editorial tradition to choose between 2 July (vi Non.) and 3 July (v Non.); works.yaml currently fixes it at 3 July, but the ancient reading is genuinely ambiguous and the entry should be flagged “2 or 3 July.” Cicero is at Arpinum to put the small estates in order, as he had warned Atticus he must (Att.\ 13.9). News from Caesar arrives from Spain (a letter of condolence on Tullia, sent the day before the Kalends of May from Hispalis); a promulgated measure on enlarging the city has reached Cicero only as a rumour. Torquatus continues to receive Cicero’s good offices in the matter Dolabella had witnessed; Quintus has met with Atticus in Cicero’s absence.

The texture is the Atticus correspondence at its most miscellaneous: business, politics, literary self-defence, philosophical self-soothing. Four Greek tags carry the load — [Greek: philaitios] (“fault-finding,” of Tubero, whom Cicero will not provoke further by enlarging the Pro Ligario), [Greek: philosophos] (a wry self-deprecation of his own moralising), [Greek: dedechthai] (“to have been stung,” of Atticus’ over-anxious reading of an earlier letter), and the asseverative [Greek: me gar autois] (“far be it from me” or “not on their account”). Section 4 is textually difficult: the daggered in toto is corrupt, and the indignant rhetorical questions are hard to punctuate; the rendering preserves the broken, self-interrupting register without smoothing it. The remark about “holding sway over the courts” is sarcastic — Cicero is signalling that his real concern is loyalty to a friend (apparently Torquatus or his unnamed client), not forensic prestige.