Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 13 August 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano Id. Sext. a. 709 (45). A single section, vivid and quick. Cicero addresses Atticus as “Agamemnon” — the great commander issuing his orders — and reports, in a quick tricolon, his obedience: he dropped what he had begun (instituta omisi), threw aside what was in hand (ea quae in manibus habebam abieci), and “roughed out” (edolavi) what Atticus had told him to write. The edolavi preserves the woodworker’s image — hewn out with the axe, not yet finished — and that is precisely the boast: he has done the rough draft on demand.

The rest is housekeeping with one barbed last line. Pollex will report on the accounts; the freedman is being kept short and must be looked after this first year, but the leash will be tightened next. He cannot get down to Puteoli to deal in person with Cluvius’s estate, both because of Torquatus and because Caesar is now nearby. And then the closing fillip: Dolabella has written that he is coming the day after the Ides — o magistrum molestum!, “what a tiresome schoolmaster!” Dolabella was taking declamation lessons with Cicero that summer, and the relentless visits had begun to grate. The whole letter is one sustained joke about who is master and who is pupil — of Agamemnon, of Dolabella, of Cicero himself.