Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on the ninth day before the Kalends of September 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano ix K. Sept. a. 709 (45). Two sections. The first follows up on the letter Cicero composed to Caesar about the Anticatones (the previous letter, Att. 13.50): Atticus had asked for a copy and Cicero had forgotten to send one; he wants Atticus to know he was not embarrassed before him at the prospect of playing some kind of ridiculous part — the noun is corrupt in the manuscripts (preserved here as micillus ) and probably names a stock comic figure, a little Cyrus or little man. He wrote, he insists, as one peer to another [Greek: pros ison homoion] and without flattery [Greek: akolakeutos] — the two Greek tags carrying the methodological claim about the letter’s tone.

The second section is the usual mix: relief that Atticus’s daughter Attica is past some illness (“now at last I have certainty”); the standing demand for full news of Tigellius’s take from Caesar; and the imminent arrival of Cicero’s brother Quintus, who is somewhere on the road and may turn up either at Tusculum or at Atticus’s house in Rome. “I shall have to come up to Rome myself, or he will be flying over before I get there” — the participial advolet catches the harassed pace of the summer.