Cicero to Atticus, written at the Pompeian villa (or, more precisely, as he embarks from it) on 17 July 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Pompeiano xvi K. Sext. a. 710 (44). Cicero has moved south from Puteoli to his Pompeian estate and is now boarding three light ten-oared boats for the next leg of the journey toward Brundisium and the embarkation for Greece. The letter opens by replying at last to a still earlier letter — Atticus’s account of his meeting with Antony at Tibur, in which Atticus had decided to “give him his hand” and even volunteer thanks. Cicero approves: the state will desert us before our property does. Inserted into the praise is a flicker of literary play — “o Tite, si quid” — a fragment of an Ennian line addressing a Titus (the Atticus’s praenomen is also Titus), dropped in mid-clause as the kind of in-joke the two old men have been trading for thirty years.

The literary business is the recently-finished De Gloria, sent to Atticus in 16.2 and now followed by a reworked version (the archetypon itself, overwritten and patched) which Atticus is to read aloud to dinner-guests — but only when they are cheerful and well-fed, “lest they vent their irritation on me when they are really annoyed with you.” The middle sections turn to the never-finished business of debts, the awkwardness of Dolabella’s name still among them, the young Quintus’s unreformed character, and the strangeness of the moment itself — “we are leaving peace to return to war, and the time we might have spent in our little estates, prettily built and amply pleasant, we are spending in voyaging abroad.” The closing image is the writer himself getting into the boat; the closing word is for Attica, whom Cicero longs to kiss in absentia.