Cicero to Atticus, sent from Astura on 13 April 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Asturae it Id. Apr. a. 710 (44) (the body adds Astura iii Idus, the day of writing as he sets out). Less than a month after the Ides of March, Cicero is moving south through his estates, and the news from Rome is all bad. The Liberators are still effectively penned up: Brutus and Cassius have left the Capitol but cannot move freely; the legions Caesar had collected for the Parthian campaign are returning, standards and all, from Gaul, and may yet be turned to dynastic ends; the freedmen of Caesar’s household have begun to plot on their own account, “which could easily be put down, if Antony had any sense.” The young Octavius has just landed in Italy, and Cicero already wants to know whether anyone is rallying to him.

The letter is hurried — written on the road, sprinkled with Greek (esitesas for his friend’s fast; the self-correction mnemonikon hamartema when he muddles Calvena with Asinius; phurmos polus, the bath-keeper’s “great muddle”; euripista for the easily-shifted props of the new regime; neoterismou for a possible disturbance) — in the rapid, ironic register of the daily correspondence under threat. The third paragraph’s tricolon vides magistratus, vides tyranni satellites, vides exercitus is the architecture of the piece: the apparatus of state still standing, but staffed by Caesar’s men, and the Liberators reduced to “only praised and only loved” (tantum modo laudari atque amari) — a bitter diminutive in a single line.