Cicero to Atticus, written at the Puteolan villa later on the same day as 14.20 — Perseus dateline Scr. in Puteolano v Id. Mai. a. 710 (44). The manuscripts preserve both letters of 11 May; Cicero’s own opening sentence (“when I had just a little while ago handed a letter to Cassius’s courier”) anchors this one as the second. His own slave-courier has arrived without a letter from Atticus (“like a portent”), but bearing a reply from Dolabella — not yet on the dowry, but answering an earlier letter handsomely enough.

Then Balbus comes to the door, and Cicero’s account of him sharpens into one of the bitter set pieces of the post-Ides correspondence. Balbus is too guarded to be read, but a man who fears peace is unmistakable; his whole speech is a covert apology for Antony. Cicero diagnoses the underlying error in plain Latin and Greek both: the Liberators acted with the spirit of men (animo virili) and the planning of children (consilio puerili) — they left the heir of the kingship alive (Antony himself, here glanced at), feared the wrong man, and let the right one breathe. The Greek phrase [Greek: huposolokia] (“quite a bit barbarous”) marks the political solecisms multiplying around him — including the fact that the house of Pontius at Naples is now occupied by the mother of Caesar’s assassin. Cicero recommends himself a re-reading of his own Cato Maior, since old age is making him sour, and signs off with [Greek: bebi\=otai] — “my life has been lived; let the young see to it.” The closing sketch — the letter dictated over dessert at Vestorius’s, dinner tomorrow at Hirtius’s, a five-course meal ([Greek: pentelopion]), and the joke about “looking for our travelling shoes” ( talaria, Mercury’s winged sandals) rather than enlisting in any camp — has the speed of the bay-of-Naples letters at their best.