Cicero to Atticus, written at Astura on 27 July 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Asturae vi K. Sext. a. 709 (45). A single-section note dashed off on the evening of arrival: “I reached Astura on the eighth day before the Kalends, having rested three hours at Lanuvium to escape the heat.” The substance is logistical — a request that Atticus, through Egnatius Maximus, hold off needing Cicero in Rome until the Nones, and that he finish the business with Publilia (the former wife) in Cicero’s absence.

The charm of the letter is in its self-mocking close. Cicero pretends to imagine that gossip about his marriage to Publilia still grips the city, then bursts the pretence himself: “The People take an interest in it, of course! By Hercules, I do not think so; the story was sung threadbare long ago. But I wanted to fill out the page.” That stray confession of a correspondent padding the parchment until it ran to a column — sed complere paginam volui — is the human reflex of the daily-letter discipline, and a reminder that the Tusculan- and-Astura sequence with Atticus is at one level simply two men writing to each other every day because they have agreed to. The closing pointer to the still-running negotiation over the Scapulan gardens carries through to the next letters in the series.