Cicero to Atticus from the Arpinum estate, 2 July 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Arpinati vi Non. Quint. a. 710 (44). Cicero is moving south down the Latin coast towards Puteoli, the port from which he means to sail; he has paused at Arpinum, the family estate. The letter is a five-section omnibus of business: Quintus’s family entanglement with Lepta and his son; a rumour that Lucius Piso means to slip out of Italy on a forged senatorial decree; the courier who reached him at Anagnia carrying yet another letter from Brutus asking him to attend Brutus’s games in Rome; his refusal to do so; the games as a touchstone of political nerve; and the various small matters of property he has left in Atticus’s hands — Marcus Aelius’s water-rights, the half-share of the Tullianum that Cascellius has been pressing him on, the eighth-share at 380,000\ sesterces.

The political weight of the games is the heart of section 1. Brutus, in exile from the city in all but name, is required by his praetorship to put them on; he must do so through delegates, and his political survival turns on whether the Roman crowd receives the festival warmly. Cicero, who has been refusing to set foot in Rome since the arms of Antony began, will not attend — to do so would be neither necessary nor (he insists) honourable — but he is desperately invested in the outcome, and asks Atticus for daily reports from the opening commission onward. The Greek phrases are typical of the genre: pseudengraph\=oi (a forged decree), atop\=otaton (the most absurd thing in the world). The daggered clause in section 4 on the eighth share is corrupt; the figures and the broker’s name are clear, but the syntax has not survived intact.