Cicero to Atticus, written from the Puteolan villa on 9 July 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Puteolano vii Id. Quint. a. 710 (44). The letter is from the day before 16.4; the manuscript ordering does not match the chronology. Brutus is staging the Apollinarian games in absentia (he holds the urban praetorship but cannot return to Rome), and Cicero is south on the bay of Naples, waiting on news and on a convoy.

The heart of the letter is the central section on young Quintus, Cicero’s nephew. After years of unsteadiness and disloyalty — he had taken Caesar’s part against his elders — the young man has spent several days with Cicero and emerged, in Cicero’s account, wholly changed: changed by “certain writings of mine I had to hand” (almost certainly the recently-finished De Officiis drafts), by daily conversation, and by precept. Cicero has stood up for him to Brutus, who took the boy on faith, refused a guarantor, embraced him, and dismissed him with a kiss. Cicero now asks Atticus to credit this reformation and to give it the weight of his authority. The transformation will not, in the event, hold: by autumn the boy will be back to his old courses.

Around this core are the lighter pieces: Accius’s Tereus at the games (Brutus had supposed it was a play by his ancestor, the Brutus who expelled the kings — the joke turns on the name); the question of a joint voyage with Brutus (the Greek homoploiai, “sailing in company”), which Brutus is in no hurry to commit to; the asides of plotted alternative ports — Venusia, Hydruntum, back here again — “I will die if anyone but you holds me here” — and the closing literary banter with Atticus about the collection of Cicero’s letters, of which Tiro already has about seventy and the rest are to be retrieved from Atticus and corrected by Cicero himself before publication.