Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa around the Nones of Sextilis 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano (iii) Non. Sext. a. 709 (45). Two short sections of domestic and editorial housekeeping. Lepta is asking Cicero to come at need: a certain Babullius has died, leaving an inheritance in which Caesar takes one twelfth and Lepta a third, and Lepta is fretting — irrationally, Cicero notes in Greek ([Greek: alogos]) — that he will not be permitted to keep his share. Cicero will go if summoned, not before.

The second section turns to one of the running editorial threads of the summer: Cicero’s eulogy (laudatio) of Porcia, the half-sister of Cato. He has corrected the piece in haste and is sending it to Atticus so that, if a copy ends up with Domitius the younger or with Brutus, the corrected text is the one circulated. The closing flick — “some passages I can scarcely believe I have read” — captures the editor’s wince at his own colleagues’ eulogies, here the rival pieces by Varro and a certain Ollius which Cicero wants resent for a second look.