Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 7 or 8 August 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano vii aut vi Id. Sext. a. 709 (45). The most textually corrupt of this Tusculan cluster: two short sections studded with daggered cruxes that the manuscript tradition cannot disentangle. The nephew is the subject again. Brutus has reported to Cicero that young Quintus is now declaring himself for the boni — the loyalists, the old republican set — and Cicero’s response is acid: good news indeed (in Greek), but where will he find any? Unless he has hanged himself in the meantime. A second Greek word, philotechnema, recalls a tableau Cicero saw in the Parthenon during his youth — Ahala and Brutus, the tyrannicides of legend — as the appropriate emblem of what the younger Quintus is now pretending to.

The second section is the practical one: should Cicero come to Rome or stay put? He confesses he has been taken in (kekepphomai — a colloquial Greek verb borrowed from the gull, the bird that is easy to catch). He wants Atticus’s reading of the whole picture (another Greek tag) at first light tomorrow. The register is hurried and elliptical; the daggered cruxes are kept in place, and the translation does not invent through them.