Cicero to Atticus, written at the Puteolan villa on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of January 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Puteolano xiv K. Ian. a. 709 (45) — the morning after one of the best-known social encounters in Roman literature: Julius Caesar’s dinner with Cicero on 19 December 45 BC, the third day of the Saturnalia. Caesar, on his way through Campania four months before the Ides of March, has quartered himself with two thousand troops at Philippus’s villa next door and has come over to Cicero for the evening meal. The letter, written immediately afterward, is Cicero’s account to Atticus of how it went. The famous opening note — o hospitem mihi tam gravem [Greek: ametameleton] — sets the register: a guest who weighed on the host, but a visit he is glad to have got through. The visit went off pleasantly, the food was elegant, the conversation was literary; Caesar even heard the news of his henchman Mamurra (almost certainly bad news) and did not change his expression. He ate and drank freely on the emetic regimen ([Greek: emetiken... adeos]) that allowed Roman dignitaries to manage a banquet.

This is the most political of the letters of this run not because Cicero says anything political — almost the opposite: [Greek: spoudaion ouden] in sermone, [Greek: philologa] multa, nothing serious in the talk, plenty of literary chat — but because of what the silence cost. Caesar comes to dinner under the protection of two thousand men, and the armed escort draws up on either side of his horse as he passes Dolabella’s villa next door, “nowhere else along the way.” The closing line — “a billeting ([Greek: epistathmeian]), as I said, was a burden, not a bother” — gives a name in Greek to the political condition: not Roman hospitium between equals, but something nearer the imposed quartering of a military master on his subject. Cicero saves the political point for the Greek word and keeps the Latin host’s pose intact.