Cicero to Atticus, written on 8 April 44 BC, still at the suburban villa of Matius — Perseus dateline Scr. in suburbano Mati vi Id. Apr. a. 710 (44). The day after the Matius interview, Cicero is reading Atticus’s two letters from Rome: applause in the theatre for Lucius Cassius (one of the Liberators’ connections), and what is evidently encouraging news about the actor Publilius Syrus and the temper of the crowd. These are the “good signs of a public mind in agreement with itself” that Cicero will keep watching through April: whether the city, gathered into a theatre, can be seen to side with the deed of the Ides.

The middle of the letter circles a corrected anecdote from the previous day — Cicero now repeating Caesar’s remark about him in Brutus’s antechamber, with Brutus, not himself, identified as the [Greek: phalakrōma] (“bald-pate”) who is the deadly enemy of otium. The Perseus text carries daggered cruxes around the line that introduces the joke, preserved here, and a doublet of the Greek tag (φαλάκωμα / φαλάκρωμα) which the cruxes acknowledge. The closing is the itinerary that runs through these post-Ides days: Tusculum today, Lanuvium tomorrow, then Astura — with the standing courtesy to Pilia and Atticus’s daughter Attica.