Cicero to Atticus, written at Antium on 13 June 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Antiati Id. Iun. a. 710 (44). Cicero is on the move, two months after the assassination of Caesar and at the point when Brutus and Cassius are reconsidering whether to remain in Italy at all. The Buthrotian affair (see 15.14) is still in play: Lucius Antonius, the consul’s brother, is reported to be agitating against the city, and Cicero has prepared a sworn deposition to be sealed at Atticus’s word. There follow practical instructions about a sum owed to the Arpinate community, which is to be paid to the aedile Lucius Fadius and no one else.

Section 2 contains the famous outburst, reginam odi: “I detest the queen.” Cleopatra, who had been resident in Caesar’s gardens across the Tiber from her arrival in 46 down to her flight after the Ides, had apparently promised Cicero something — something literary, evidently, and worth being proud of in public — and had failed to deliver. Her agents Ammonius and Sara have compounded the offence with personal insolence. The bitter little aside “they suppose I have no spirit, or rather no stomach” is the kind of pun (animus “courage” versus stomachus “spleen”) that survives imperfectly in any language. The letter closes with two financial nuisances: Eros, Cicero’s freedman accountant, has left Cicero short of cash to fund his projected travel, and young Marcus Cicero, studying in Athens, has gone without his allowance since April — an embarrassment that pains Cicero the more because the boy is too modest to complain of it to his father directly, and has told Tiro instead.