Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 2 June 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano iv Non. Iun. a. 710 (44). Late on the previous evening a letter from Balbus has arrived with the latest political news: on the Nones (the 5th) the Senate will meet to assign Marcus Brutus a grain commission in Asia and Cassius another in Sicily. Both men are praetors and ought to be administering Italy; both are also the chief assassins of Caesar, and the proposal is plainly a manoeuvre by Antony to push them out of Italy under a face- saving title. Cicero is appalled — a grain-buying errand is no fit charge for a praetor, and certainly not for the man who killed the tyrant. Yet, he admits, anything is better than sitting at the Eurotas (the river of Sparta, then a stock refuge for Romans contemplating exile or a self-imposed retreat abroad). The daggered cruxes around the Persian Portico — a famous building at Sparta — and the comparison to Lanuvium mark a textually wrecked passage where Cicero seems to be mocking the idea of treating Lacedaemon as a near and pleasant resort.

The second section turns to Atticus’s own anxieties. The previous letter from Atticus had begun with some alarming report of armed men at his house, which Cicero is relieved to hear has blown over. Atticus too is angling for an embassy of his own, and Cicero awaits news of how that has gone. Cicero adds that a letter from Brutus, which Atticus had read and forwarded, has so unsettled him that, already in want of counsel, he is now slower for sheer grief. The letter ends abruptly: there was little to write, and even now uncertainty whether the courier will reach Atticus at all.