Cicero to Atticus, written from the seaside villa at Astura on 29 July 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Asturae iv K. Sext. a. 709 (45). The letter falls outside the dense Tusculan daily-letter run of mid-May to early June and belongs to the later Astura stretch of the same summer: Cicero has retreated to the coast, is awaiting news from Dolabella and from Quintus, and is meanwhile chasing political gossip — Torquatus, Pansa, Critonius, Metellus and Balbinus — as the messages from town come in.

The heart of the letter, however, is a piece of pure scholarly second-guessing: in the Academica Cicero had adopted Atticus’s suggested rendering of the Greek epoch\=e (the Sceptic “suspension of judgement”) by the Latin verb inhibere, on the assumption that it described holding the oars steady. Watching a ship come in at the villa yesterday, he has discovered that the term in fact denotes a reverse-stroke that moves the ship — the opposite of suspension. He wants the original wording restored in the book, and Atticus to warn Varro in case he has already passed on the change. Three Greek phrases sit at the joints: epoch\=ei twice, for the Sceptic technical term itself, and probol\=en, the boxer’s defensive guard, in Carneades’s analogy. The closing section preserves a daggered crux in the Perseus text (si quid esset certe ne) which I have left daggered.