Cicero to Atticus, written at Puteoli on 22 April 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Puteoli x K. Mai. a. 710 (44). The opening sentence is one of the most cited formulations of Cicero’s post-Ides disillusionment: the Ides of March, he fears, have given the Liberators nothing beyond their pleasure in the deed and the satisfaction of revenge. The single Greek interjection \=o stands by itself in the manuscripts — a cry rather than a word — and the English keeps it as a bare “Oh!”.

The middle of the letter is a catalogue of Antony’s abuses of Caesar’s papers: a (forged or back-dated) law granting the Sicilians Roman citizenship, sold for cash; a similar irregularity in the affair of Deiotarus, the Galatian king, brokered through Fulvia. “Six hundred more of the same kind” (sescenta similia) is the kind of round hyperbole that recurs in these letters. Cicero closes with a half-line from a lost Latin tragedy (ubi nec Pelopidarum — a stock phrase for a place beyond the reach of familiar horrors) and a wry note that he is dictating from a couch at Vestorius’s, where the conversation is more reliable in arithmetic than in dialectic.