Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa on 27 June 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano v K. Quint. a. 710 (44). The subject is the Buthrotian affair: the free Greek city of Buthrotum on the Epirote coast had been threatened with a punitive land-confiscation, and Atticus, who owned estates there, had spent months trying to head it off. Caesar before his death had granted Atticus’s request; after the Ides, the matter fell to the consul Dolabella, and a favourable judgement had now been secured. Atticus had come to Tusculum in person to thank Cicero for his part in the intercession; Cicero, having already written once to Dolabella, now writes again so that the consul should not think his earlier thanks perfunctory.

The letter encloses a full copy of the second letter to Dolabella — a study in elaborate Ciceronian gratitude, with the political subtext that Dolabella’s continuing protection of Buthrotum is what Cicero is really after. The closing section returns to Cicero’s own preoccupation of the summer: he is at work on his compositions — the philosophical writing of 44, the De Finibus already in circulation and the Tusculan Disputations and De Natura Deorum in progress — and warns Atticus, his usual editor, to keep his red-lead pencil ready. The Greek term meteoros, “suspended in mid-air,” is Cicero’s wry self-description of a mind too taken up with great thoughts to attend properly to small ones.