Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa around 5 August 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano m. Non. Sext. a. 709 (45). Two very short sections, the third letter in three days about the nephew. Cicero opens with a single hot exclamation — “What incredible falsity!” — on learning that young Quintus tells his father one story and his mother the opposite. Then a turn: the fellow is already going soft, conceding that his father has every right to be angry.

The second section concedes Atticus’s tactical advice from 13.38: the crooked path it shall be. Cicero will come to Rome, reluctantly, dragging himself away from the Academica. He notes Brutus’s return from the latest of his journeys “not from the place I would have wished” — the glancing reference is probably to a visit to Caesar’s circle — and asks Atticus for books he needs, including a treatise by Phaedrus the Epicurean, On the Gods. A daggered crux at the very end (a missing second title in the manuscript tradition) is preserved in place. The register is hurried: short clauses, mid-sentence shifts, the inside-baseball “Brutus too,” you say — the back-and-forth of a daily correspondence.