Cicero to Atticus, written from Arpinum on or shortly before 9 December 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Arpinati ante v Id. Dec. a. 710 (44). This is the last surviving letter to Atticus that the manuscript tradition preserves; nothing further runs forward into 43 BC, and the archive that gave us sixteen books of intimate correspondence breaks off here, on the eve of the Mutina campaign. The letter is also one of the longest of the year, covering legal business, the constitutional crisis, and an ugly personal money problem in a single sweep.

The opening is one of Cicero’s familiar pieces of self-deprecating play: he is not writing in his own hand, and yes, it really is from laziness. Then to business. The first section is on his quarrel with Dolabella, his former son-in-law, who had “begun to defend the republic with my encouragement, and then, bought off with money, not only deserted her but, so far as it lay in him, actually overthrew her.” Cicero will now press the full rigour of the law, but asks Atticus to consider whether bringing in his agent rather than calling the sureties would be the more dignified course. The legal vocabulary — sponsores, litem contestabuntur, satis dato — is technical, and the text is in places visibly corrupt (daggers preserved).

The middle section turns to the political situation and produces the letter’s most famous moment: a speech of Octavian’s has reached Cicero in which the young heir, with hand stretched out toward the statue of his adoptive father, swears “as I hope to attain the honours of my father.” Cicero’s response is in Greek, the disgust unbroken by the register-shift: [Greek: m\=ede s\=othei\=en hupo ge toioutou] — “may I never be saved by the likes of him.” This is December 44, and the calculation is the one that will prove fatal: that Octavian can be used against Antony and then discarded. Cicero has not yet committed to that gamble but is moving toward it; he will look to Casca’s tribunate (Casca, one of the assassins) as the index of which way the young man will go. The cover-letter from Lepta which he is sending on suggests Antony — “that [Greek: Stratullax],” that strutting comic-stage soldier — has been knocked off his pedestal.

The closing two sections drop the public matter abruptly — “in cases beyond hope even Hippocrates forbids the application of medicine” — and turn to a humiliating private one: a debt of 25,000 sesterces to Montanus, which Cicero had promised to pay on his son’s honour, has gone unpaid, Aurelius has been forced to borrow at ruinous interest, and the money Atticus had thought would come from Dolabella is not coming. “It is more shameful to fall privately than publicly.” The letter ends with Cicero’s decision to come down from Arpinum: adsum igitur — “So — I am coming.” It is the last line we have from him to Atticus.