Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 27 May 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano vi K. Iun. a. 709 (45). One in the daily series of late-May letters from Tusculum that revolve around two intertwined projects: the revision and Varro-dedication of the Academica, and the increasingly elaborate financial machinery for buying the suburban gardens across the Tiber where Cicero means to build a shrine (fanum) to his dead daughter Tullia. Here the gardens question dominates: Chrysippus has been out to inspect the Scapulan property, the villa is what Cicero expected, the bathrooms are tolerable, a covered walk will have to be added, and the right grove for the shrine has, awkwardly, become a busy spot.

Two Greek phrases punctuate the page. The first, aphidruma “shrine,” is the technical term Cicero keeps reaching for when he describes what the gardens are for: not a pleasure-house but a sanctuary. The second is the Homeric ton typhon mou pros theōn tropophorēson (after Od. or Il., with tropophoreō from Deut. 1.31 in the Septuagint — but Cicero is reaching for the Greek verb of patient bearing): “in the gods’ name, bear with my vanity.” He is asking Atticus, in Greek, not to mock him for caring so much about the symbolic prestige (typhos) of the location. The financing turns on Faberius’s outstanding debt: if Atticus can “clear that debt,” Cicero will outbid Otho for the Scapulan gardens; if not, he falls back on Clodia’s, where the Dolabella debt may suffice for cash on the spot. The closing exchange about “Cicero’s letter” refers to young Marcus’s complaints from his Athenian studies. The crux misissem I mark with daggers, following the editorial tradition.