Cicero to Atticus, written at the Puteolan villa on 8 July 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Puteolano viii Id. Quint. a. 710 (44). This letter opens Book 16 of the correspondence with Atticus, the last surviving book of the collection; what follows runs from July through early November 44 BC, the final months in which Cicero’s letters to Atticus are preserved. Cicero has reached Puteoli on the Nones of July on his way south toward embarkation for Greece. The first indignation of the letter is the calendar: the month formerly called Quinctilis has just been renamed Iulius in Caesar’s honour — so Atticus’s letter is dated “the Nones of July,” and Cicero, writing to a Brutus who has lately killed the man so commemorated, finds the new month-name unbearable (“By Hercules, what a crew they are!”; “Could anything be more disgraceful than ‘July’ for Brutus?”). His response is the Greek tag et’ e\=omen, “let it still be,” an old Homeric refrain — leave it, drop it, let it pass.

The body of the letter is a rapid sweep of the news. The Buthrotian land-grant trouble (Caesar’s veterans on Atticus’s Epirote estates) has flared into violence; Plancus is reportedly moving fast; Pompey the younger may or may not be in arms in Spain (Cicero takes the rumour of Sextus as serious enough that, if true, “we must serve as slaves, but without a civil war”). Ventidius’s threat he writes off as a panic. The financial paragraph is unusually granular: 210,000 sesterces have been arranged; young Marcus at Athens is to have his allowance adjusted to 80,000 sesterces a year from the Kalends of April, instead of being kept on the meager driblets Xeno has been doling out. The closing paragraph is the most personal: young Quintus, Cicero’s nephew — previously a great fraud — has now promised he will be “a Cato,” and asks his uncle to stand surety for the reformation. Cicero will not vouch for him; he sends Atticus the letter the boy has dictated and asks him to judge for himself, but quietly warns that he himself is unmoved. “Heaven grant he does what he promises: the joy would be common to us both. But I — I will say no more.”