Cicero to Atticus, written from the family estate at Arpinum in the middle of November 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Arpinati medio mense Novembri a. 710 (44). Cicero has retreated inland to his birthplace as the political calculus in Rome runs out: Octavian’s troops are gathering, Antony’s are coming up from Brundisium, and the question is which of the two evils is less to be wished for. “If Octavian comes to count for much, the acts of the tyrant will be confirmed far more firmly than they were in the temple of Tellus” — the post-Ides settlement in which Antony, in that very temple, had pushed through the wholesale ratification of Caesar’s measures — “and the thing will tell against Brutus. But if he is beaten, you see how intolerable Antony will be — so that one cannot tell which to wish for.”

The second section (Perseus’s numbering skips 2) turns from politics to a piece of philosophical lexicography: Cicero confirms that the Greek [Greek: kathēkon] — “the proper” or “the fitting,” a key Stoic technical term — is rightly Latinized as officium, the headword of the treatise he is then finishing. From there the letter slides through a string of brief notices — the death of one Nepos’s son, the loss of Caninius, a complimentary [Greek: hupomnēma] from the philosopher Athenodorus, an unshakeable cold — and closes with a textually rough sentence in which someone, identified only as “the great-grandson of your grandfather” writing to “the grandson of my father,” threatens to open up the temple of Ops on the anniversary of the suppression of Catiline. The riddle is opaque to us; presumably it was not to Atticus.