Cicero to Gaius Antonius (the consul of 63 BC who had been Cicero’s colleague and was now proconsul of Macedonia), written at Rome at the end of November or beginning of December 62 BC. The cool, formal opening acknowledges that the friendship has cracked: Cicero would have written nothing but commendations were Antonius not a former colleague, but Atticus is going east and forces a real letter. The middle paragraph is the bill of grievance — Antonius has, on Cicero’s account, ignored or even spoken against him — with the famous gentle aside, “I do not dare to say that I have ‘ascertained’ it, lest I happen to use that very word which men say is wont to be falsely turned against me by you” — the verb comperisse, “to have ascertained,” had been the hostile tag for Cicero’s evidence-gathering against the Catilinarian conspirators. The closing paragraph commends Atticus and his Epirote business affairs to Antonius’s care — the practical reason for the letter that is otherwise mostly an ultimatum.