Cicero to Atticus, written from his Arpinum estate on 4 July 709 AUC (Perseus dateline iv Non.\ Quint.\ a.\ 709 (45)). Cicero is still at Arpinum putting the small estates in order and is about to come back to Tusculanum, where he and Atticus have arranged to meet. The letter is a miscellany of literary and financial business: the Academica that Cicero is dedicating to Varro (the running anxiety of these weeks — whether Varro will take the dedication well, and which copies are fit to be released); the murder of Marcus Marcellus in the Piraeus, of which Cassius had sent a notice and Servius Sulpicius Rufus has now sent the particulars from Athens; the dunning of assigned debtors; the ongoing Brutus–Claudia trouble; the embarrassment over Caerellia’s having obtained a draft of the Academica from somewhere; and the proposed purchase of a grove (the planned shrine to Tullia) which Cicero is starting to argue himself out of.

Three Greek tags, all in the standard Atticus register: [Greek: asmenaitata] “most gladly” (of weaving Atticus into the dialogue), [Greek: ta kata meros] “the particulars” (of Servius’ fuller account of Marcellus’ death), and [Greek: eulogian] “plausibility” (the intellectual cover the grove proposal has, even if the location is too remote). The textual crux at the end of section 4 — a quis sine te opprimi militia est — is preserved as a dagger; the sense is that Cicero finds it hard going to handle the co-heirs without Atticus at his elbow. “Tullius my secretary” (Tullium scribam) is a freedman scribe of Cicero’s, not the orator’s son. The closing complaint that Attica has not sent her grandfather-in-letters so much as a greeting is one of the recurrent affectionate teases of the correspondence.