Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 28 May 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano post op xxxi v K. Iun. a. 709 (45). The fifth Kalends of June. The day’s note is short and two-thirds practical: the Faberian debt is still not discharged; the auction (for the Scapulan gardens) is two days off; Atticus must keep Faberius courted, however much such courtship grates on Cicero, who calls it a near-crime. He expects Atticus himself the day after tomorrow.

The second paragraph is a research request that lights up the literary project running underneath the daily letters: the Academica being re-cast for Varro. Cicero is staging a dialogue in the manner of Dicaearchus — a politikon syllogon, “political assembly,” a set-piece gathering of named historical figures at Olympia or some similar venue — and he needs to know who the ten Roman commissioners sent to Mummius Achaicus in 146 BC actually were. Polybius does not list them. Hortensius gave him Tuditanus, but Libo’s chronology makes that impossible (Tuditanus was praetor only fourteen years after Mummius’s consulship, hence too young in 146). Two Greek phrases: kolakeiai, “flatteries,” the deprecating word for the social courtship Atticus must keep paying Faberius; and politikon syllogon, “political assembly,” the technical name for Dicaearchus’s literary form. The Mummius-commission research will continue in 13.32 (where Cicero proposes Postumius instead).