Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 21 July 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano xiii aut xii K. Sext. a. 709 (45), which fixes the day as 20 or 21 July. Three short sections, packed with the daily threads of the summer’s correspondence. The opening flash is a glance at the ludi Victoriae Caesaris: Caesar’s statue had been carried in procession among the gods, and the people had refused to applaud Victory because they had been forced to applaud the “bad neighbour” (Caesar) alongside her. “Splendid of them” (populum praeclarum) is as openly political as Cicero ever gets in these notes. The procession is also what makes him flinch from finishing the letter to Caesar that Brutus had come out to Tusculum to press on him — the much-discussed “letter to Caesar” of advice, never sent.

The middle section is the now-running joke about Atticus having handed the Academica to Varro — “yet you ventured!” (ausus es) — and a passing approval of something pious that Attica has done. The third drops into the purest house-keeping mode: Cicero corrects a factual slip in the already-circulating Pro Ligario (Lucius Corfidius was dead before the speech’s date), and asks Atticus to set the copyists Pharnaces, Antaeus, and Salvius to scrubbing the name out of every copy. The Greek tag for the mistake is mnemonikon hamartema, a slip of memory — a small candid window into how Cicero’s published speeches circulated and got patched after release.