Cicero to Atticus, written at Arpinum on 22 May 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Arpinati xt K. Iun. a. 710 (44), where the corrupt “xt” is conventionally read as xi K. Iun., the eleventh before the Kalends of June. (The works.yaml entry places the letter on 1 June and the launch prompt at Astura; both are superseded by the Perseus dateline as restored.) On reaching Arpinum Cicero finds two of Atticus’s letters waiting, and answers the earlier of them first. Atticus, planning to be at Tusculum when Cicero arrives there on the sixth before the Kalends, has urged him that “one must obey the victors”; Cicero refuses the parallel his friend has drawn with the temple-of-Apollo negotiations under the consulship of Lentulus and Marcellus, since the situation is not comparable — especially now that Marcellus and others are quitting Italy.

The second section turns to the later letter: Alexio’s posthumous arrangements, Hirtius’s loyalty, a barbed wish for the worse against Antony (“since he is what he is, I want it the worse for him”), young Quintus, and — at length — Brutus’s recently published speech on the Capitoline. Atticus has asked Cicero to write a version of it as if delivered by Brutus, and Cicero declines with mounting impatience: it cannot be reconstructed in retrospect from outside, and he is not yet ready to write “of a tyrant most justly slain.” That will come, “in another manner and at another time.” The letter ends in the rapid telegraphic register of these exchanges — the tribunes’ suppression of the gilded chair voted to Caesar, the fourteen rows of seats reserved at the games — and with the affectionate hope that Brutus stayed at Tusculum willingly and long enough.