Cicero to Atticus, written at Arpinum on 24 May 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Arpinati ix K. Iun. a. 710 (44). (The launch prompt’s “Astura” for this letter is superseded by the Perseus dateline; Cicero is still inland at Arpinum, planning to reach Tusculum on the sixth before the Kalends, 27 May.) The letter opens at the tenth hour of the day with a courier from Q.~Fufius bearing “some little scrap of a note” that Cicero finds silly — “unless, perhaps, everything that you do not love seems silly” — and two of Atticus’s letters, the more recent of which Cicero answers first. Antony’s plans look turbulent, and his stripping of Cisalpine Gaul from Decimus Brutus seems to Cicero to aim at war; he would not desire it if the Buthrotian business were not already being seen to, and even so he grudges that it is not being settled through his own offices.

Sections 2 and 3 deliver the most explicit retraction of the Ides of March in the whole correspondence. “We used manly spirits and, believe me, boyish counsels. The tree was cut down, not torn up by the roots” — the conspirators killed the man without removing the system, and now “you see how it sprouts again.” Atticus has pressed Cicero to write a companion piece to Brutus’s recently published Capitoline speech; Cicero refuses for the third time and at length, calls the request a [Greek: parencheir\=esis] (“interference,” literally “putting in one’s hand among another’s work”), but will consider an independent [Greek: H\=erakleideion] (a dialogue in the manner of Heraclides Ponticus) when the argument and the occasion are riper. The famous admission follows: “the Ides of March do not delight me” — for had Caesar lived, fear would not have driven the Senate to confirm his acts, and Cicero, who stood high in his favour, would not now be unfree under the heirs. “I blush, believe me; but I had already written it, and I would not delete.” Other Greek markers: [Greek: an\=o] (“up in the air,” of news involving Carfulenus), [Greek: aporia] (the perplexity about what the Liberators should do next), and [Greek: mel\=esei] (“it will be my care”). The closing precaution — that he sent the letter by his own courier rather than Fufius’s agent, lest the latter break the seal — registers the level of suspicion that May 44 has now reached.