Cicero to Atticus, written from the Tusculanum on 10 July 709 AUC (Perseus dateline vi Id.\ Quint.\ a.\ 709 (45)). Cicero is back from the Arpinum trip and has now had two letters from Atticus in successive sessions of the same day (morning and evening); he has already answered the first and turns in this letter to the second. Three running threads: his estrangement from Brutus, whose proposed visit Cicero finds awkward because they cannot quite be together in private just now; the dedication-copies of the Academica for Varro and for Brutus, which are not being held back by the copyists but are still being scrubbed of scribal errors; and a piece of inheritance business which Atticus is to push through on Cicero’s behalf with a woman named Polla and the wider household.

Two Greek tags. [Greek: symbiosis] “life together” is the elegant, semi-philosophical word for the daily intimacy between Brutus and Cicero that has, for whatever reason, faltered; the in quo maxime posita sit that introduces it is so guarded that the precise grievance remains opaque to the reader and was probably meant to. The second, [Greek: euagogos], asks Atticus to manage the Polla negotiation with smoothness and tact. The two textually difficult points are the daggered deffecti (the Academica copies described as “finished” — the correct reading is presumably descripti or similar) and the joke at the close: Atticus is to play Q.~Mucius Scaevola the jurist, whose persona will extract from Polla’s household what is owed. The remark that Cicero feels more pain at having no heir to leave his estate to than pleasure in using it is the running grief of Tullia just beneath the businesslike surface.