Cicero to Atticus, written on 9 April 44 BC at the Tusculan villa — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano v Id. Apr. a. 710 (44). Atticus’s last letter has been “tranquil”; Cicero half-prays it stays so, but Matius’s verdict from two days earlier is still in his ear. Then the day’s incident: his estate’s builders, sent into the city for grain, have come back empty-handed with a rumour that the whole supply is being carried off to Antony’s house. Cicero diagnoses the rumour as a piece of panic — a Pan-fright (panikon) — and brushes it aside; if it were real, Atticus would have written. The vignette catches the texture of these days: country seclusion, urban hearsay, rapid sceptical adjudication.

The second section asks Atticus to take Antony’s measure — [Greek: diathesin], his disposition, his frame of mind — and offers Cicero’s own first sketch of him: more absorbed in his dinner parties than in serious mischief, an estimate which the summer will keep revising. The closing is the running joke of the post-Ides correspondence: substantive news if Atticus has any (pragmatikon), and if not, the [Greek: episēmasian] of the crowd and the jokes of the mimes — the temper of the theatre, in lieu of the temper of the senate. Greek phrases here are deployed for that half-affectionate, half-conspiratorial register the two men reach for when politics is exactly the topic.