Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 13 July 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano iii Id. Quint. a. 709 (45). (Modern editions usually print 13.35 and 13.36 as a single composite letter; the Perseus segmentation keeps them apart, and this translation follows that segmentation.) Two short sections. The first opens with a flare of indignation: “What a disgrace! Your kinsman is enlarging the city which he first laid eyes on only two years ago, and which seemed to him too small to contain him in person.” The target is one of Atticus’s Pomponian relatives, evidently attached to Caesar’s circle and now busy with the dictator’s plans for Rome — a glancing reminder of how much of the daily chatter between these two slides past the politics it skirts.

The second section turns to two of the running threads of the summer correspondence: the still-undecided dedication of the Academica (now given to Varro, “at risk to yourself,” the playful charge Cicero keeps levelling at Atticus); and the deepening friendship between Atticus and Marcus Brutus, whose walks together at the Tusculan villas have become a recurring topic. The closing tricolon — the more often I hear it, the more gladly; the keener pleasure because you take pleasure in it; the more certain because you say it — is the kind of small architectural flourish that the daily letters carry off in passing.