Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa around the twentieth of August 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano circ. xiii K. Sept. a. 709 (45). The summer is still the summer of the Academica dedication and Cicero’s running production of philosophical work in the country, but this letter steps sideways into social-political bookkeeping. The singer-courtier Tigellius (a man with one foot in Caesarian circles) has spread a grievance against Cicero through Fadius Gallus: that Cicero abandoned his friend Phamea’s case after agreeing to take it. Cicero reconstructs the episode in detail — the conflict with the day of the Sestius trial under the Lex Pompeia, the polite refusal, Phamea’s huffy exit — to show that he owed Sestius (the tribune of 57 BC who fought for Cicero’s recall) the prior obligation.

The closing tone is the easy contempt of the senior statesman with nothing left to fear from such men: it is a fine thing to have someone one can hate with pleasure, and one is not bound to serve everyone. The final clause turns the verb servire back on the courtiers themselves — if dancing attendance is to serve, then they are the ones serving Cicero, not the other way around. Two short Greek tags ([Greek: mempsin anapherei]) carry the register Cicero prefers for this kind of social grievance: a stylized noun for “lodging a complaint,” kept off the Latin to mark it as gossip, not law.