Cicero to Atticus, written from Vibo Valentia on the toe of Italy on 25 July 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Vibone viii K. Sext. a. 710 (44). He is en route by sea toward Brundisium and the embarkation for Greece. Eight days out from his Pompeian villa, with one day’s stop at Velia (where Thalna, in absentia, kept him handsomely), he has put in at the house of Sicca at Vibo, stayed an extra day, and is now planning the next, longer leg — the long voyage from Regium: by merchantman to Patrae, or by light boat to Tarentine Leucopetra and on to Corcyra; and if by freighter, whether to push across the strait or go round by Syracuse.

The middle of the letter is one of the most candid moments in the whole sequence of the abortive Greek voyage: “By Hercules, my dear Atticus, often I ask myself, oh, why am I not with you? why am I not looking at the little eyes of Italy, my own small villas?” The answer he supplies himself — there is no danger now to run from — and the question why he is sailing at all is given an Attican answer: because Atticus has written that his setting out is being praised to the skies, but only on condition of return before the Kalends of January. The familiar litany of debts follows: the co-heirs for the Cluvian property, Publilius (his second wife Publilia’s brother, to whom he owes the return of her dowry), and Terentia, his first wife — Atticus is to settle everything before the journey to Epirus.

The letter closes with a confession of authorial carelessness: the recently-sent De Gloria has, by oversight, the same preface as the third book of the Academica. Cicero kept a volume of prefaces and drew from it whenever he started a new work; at Tusculum he had forgotten that this one was already used. Now, having recognized the slip while reading the Academica on shipboard, he has drafted a replacement preface and encloses it: Atticus is to cut out the old and paste in the new.