Cicero to Atticus, written on 10 April 44 BC at Lanuvium — Perseus dateline Scr. Lanuvi iv Id. Apr. a. 710 (44). The fourth letter in four days. The itinerary set in 14.2 has been kept: from Matius’s suburban villa to Tusculum, now to Lanuvium, with Astura still ahead. Cicero is out of Rome and hungry for news; he assumes Atticus is hearing something every day. Then the central sentence of the early post-Ides correspondence: equidem doleo, quod numquam in ulla civitate accidit non una cum libertate rem publicam reciperatam — “I grieve, what has never happened in any state, that the commonwealth has not been recovered along with liberty.” Liberty without a state to house it is the political diagnosis the rest of the year will not escape.

The second movement of the letter is the famous balance the Liberators set against that grief. Idus Martiae consolantur: the Ides of March are a consolation. Nostri [Greek: hērōes], quod per ipsos confici potuit, gloriosissime et magnificentissime confecerunt; reliquae res opes et copias desiderant, quas nullas habemus — our heroes did what they could do by themselves, with the greatest glory and the greatest magnificence; the rest demands resources and forces which we do not have. The Greek tag (hērōes) is already, ten days after the act, doing the work Cicero will keep asking it to do: dignifying the deed at the moment of its political insufficiency. The register is what these letters have begun to settle into — short, paratactic, anxious, intimate, with the standing closing pledge that the daily notes between the two men will not lapse.