Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 12 August 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. ia Tusculano prid. Id. Sext. a. 709 (45) (the ia is a manuscript flicker for in). Four sections, the day’s accumulated business in one dispatch. It opens with one of Cicero’s small Latin puns: his freedman Pollex (“Thumb”) had promised to be there on the Ides, and showed up at Lanuvium on the day before — but proved plane pollex, non index, “plainly a thumb, not a pointer.” Useless, in other words, for the errand he had been sent on. The rest of the letter is Cicero piecing the day together: an interview with Balbus at his Lanuvine villa, brokered by Lepta; the freshly arrived letter from Caesar promising to be back at Rome before the Ludi Romani; and — preserved here in a single sentence — Caesar’s report of how he had read Cicero’s Cato and reread it until he felt himself copiosior, and how, by contrast, Brutus’s rival Cato had made him think himself eloquent. A famous compliment, parried.

The middle and end of the letter are estate business: the formal sixty-day window for entering on the inheritance of the deceased Cluvius is running, Vestorius (the Puteolan agent) is being unhelpfully slow, and Pollex will have to be sent back to make the entry on Cicero’s behalf. Balbus is willing to write to Caesar about the Cluvian gardens (nil liberalius, “nothing could have been more obliging”), and supplies the figures from Cluvius’s will, including a legacy of fifty thousand sesterces to Terentia. The closing line — “when this letter had already been sealed, our courier arrived by night” — is the daily-letter machinery showing through: Cicero seals, then breaks the seal to add the late update, and Vestorius is at least partially absolved. Register is hurried, businesslike, with the small Pollex pun and the brief lament for Cossinius (dilexi hominem, “I loved the man”) the only ornaments.