Cicero to Atticus, written at the Vescine villa on 18 May 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Vescino xv K. Iun. a. 710 (44). The Vescinum is an overnight stop in the ager Vescinus, between Sinuessa on the Campanian coast and Arpinum inland: Cicero is on the road north from Puteoli toward Tusculum, having dropped a letter from Sinuessa the same morning and now picked up Atticus’s reply from a courier on arrival. The single dominant subject is Buthrotum — the free Greek city in Epirus whose territorial claim, threatened by Caesarian colonisation, Atticus was championing on behalf of its inhabitants and which Cicero pledges, with the formal emphasis of his Latin, to hold “before nothing else.”

From there the letter passes through its usual lattice of Roman news: L.~Antonius (Mark Antony’s brother) has spoken to a contio in some squalid fashion that Atticus has not transcribed; Octavian has held a public meeting Cicero too disapproves of, and his preparations for Caesar’s funeral games under Matius and Postumus are not to Cicero’s liking; Balbus would like to be freed from public hatred but cannot see how. The political mood-line is bleakly symmetrical: the Caesarians “fear peace no less than we fear arms.” At the close Cicero is touched that Atticus reports finding comfort in the first book of the Tusculan Disputations (“no refuge either better or more ready to hand”); returns to Alexio’s death with a Stoic shrug — since the illness was so grave, things “went well with him” — and asks for the secondary heirs and the date of the will. The single Greek word, [Greek: pentel\=oipon] (“five-remaining points”), is textually difficult and almost certainly corrupt; it has been rendered in line with its surface sense.