Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa in late December 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano ex. m. Dec. a. 709 (45). Three sections, the first of which is one of the small masterpieces of the correspondence: a comic dialogue, set out in direct speech, between Cicero and his nephew. Four months on from the bitter August exchange, the young man arrives at the Tusculan villa preparing to march off to the war in Spain — the long aftermath of Munda — in debt and without even travel-money. He pivots, in the middle of the encounter, to the real wound: “What really tortures me is my uncle.” Cicero, with a phrase he attributes to Atticus’s manner, “borrows a little from your style of speaking: I said nothing.” The boy promises to “take away the cause” by marrying as his mother wishes; Cicero, dryly, presses for a date.

The opening Greek tag kai is left dangling — a manuscript scar where some Greek pleasantry has dropped out — followed by Cicero’s own Greek opening to the boy: su de de ti synnous? “But you — why so pensive?” (a phrase with a faintly tragic register). The closing tag me skordou (“no garlic”) is one of Cicero’s running in-jokes with Atticus; the augurs’ ritual of templum effandum — marking out a sacred precinct — is what Lepidus is calling him to. The register is comic, controlled, almost miniature-dramatic: dialogue, frame, and outward business in three crisp sections.