Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 5 June 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano Non. Iun. aut postridie a. 710 (44). The dateline allows the Nones themselves or the day after; we follow Perseus’s first option. Atticus has now forwarded an affectionate letter from Marcus Brutus, the chief Liberator, and Cicero answers in a single breathless section that turns each of Brutus’s options over and finds every one unsatisfactory. To accept the grain commission from Antony and his circle is shameful. To attempt something fresh — another stroke against the Caesarians — is impossible: the moment has passed, the men neither dare nor can act. To stay quiet on the conspirators’ own advice gives no guarantee of safety, especially if news arrives that Decimus Brutus, then in Cisalpine Gaul, has come to grief.

Particularly galling to Cicero is the choice between two indignities: to miss the praetorian games Brutus is bound by office to put on, or to take the grain errand — which he compares to the legate’s job that Pompey gave the Academic philosopher Dio of Alexandria, a charge proverbially humiliating for a man of dignity. Cicero is reluctant to give written counsel in any case, since giving counsel in such a matter is itself unsafe; reluctant, too, because Brutus is taking his direction from his mother Servilia, whose entreaties are not counsel that another voice can easily interpose itself against. Yet silence Cicero cannot manage. He will think over how to write, and send a courier at once to Brutus, who is at Antium or perhaps already at Circeii.