Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 14 May 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano prid. Id. Mai. a. 709 (45). This is the earliest letter in Book 13’s mid-May to early-June cluster, and its position late in the book is purely an accident of ancient shelving: book 13 as transmitted opens mid-May and the editor has placed several of the very earliest letters of that run — this one among them — toward the end of the book rather than the beginning. The grief is the recent grief of Tullia’s death; the philosophical work of the season is the Academica revision and the dedication-shuffle around Varro.

Two practical strands: a property purchase — the “shrine” (fanum) for Tullia, never named explicitly here but unmistakable in the phrase in eius rei cupiditate quam nosti (“my desire for the thing you know of”) — with Vergilius’s plot the preferred site, Clodia’s second, and Drusus’s to be attempted only in desperation; and the letter Atticus had pressed Cicero to write to Caesar, now finished, with Cicero having second thoughts about whether it is necessary to send it. No Greek phrases in this letter. The reference to Astura at the opening of section 2 is to where Cicero would be, not where he is: he is writing from Tusculum but considering whether to retreat again to the coast, and decides instead to come on toward Rome via Lanuvium.