Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 2 August 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano iv Non. Sext. a. 709 (45). The second letter of the day; four short sections of mixed business and family aggravation. Cicero notes the financial threads still in motion — Xenon’s debt, the Epirote property, and the long-running auction of Scapula’s gardens that he hopes will fund the shrine for Tullia — and reports that Hirtius has been brawling at dinner parties on Cicero’s behalf against the nephew, Quintus’s son. The young man’s line is that Cicero and his brother are now estranged from Caesar and not to be trusted; Cicero shrugs — “it would be alarming, if I did not see that the king knows I have no spirit left in me” — the nearest thing in these months to an open admission of his position under the dictatorship.

The letter glances at the eulogy Cicero has written for Porcia (the half-sister of Cato, mother of Marcus Brutus’s wife, recently dead), to be conveyed onward to Domitius and to Brutus; and at the gladiatorial games Atticus has been describing as flighty rumours. Three Greek phrases stud a single short letter — a register marker of the privacy of these exchanges, where the Greek does the work of marginal commentary the Latin can’t quite carry. A daggered crux at the end of §1 (the corruption in the Xenon clause) is left in place.