When he was reluctantly made governor of Cilicia in 51, he recounted his journey there in a series of plaintive missives to Atticus, griping, for instance, about “waiting for a passage” after being held up for twelve days in Brundisium by an “indisposition” ( ad Att. In other years he ventured even farther afield. We learn from those letters that Cicero traveled to Tusculum, Cumae, Napes, Pompeii, and Antium. On Shackleton Bailey’s dating, twenty-nine letters survive from the years 56 and 55 nearly half were written outside Rome. Neither Cicero’s letter nor his mini-break away from the city are out of place in his correspondence from the mid-50s. His tongue-in-cheek tone-he has ( cogimur) to be in town for a wedding-belies both his urgent request for information and the complex network of roads and technologies of travel on which his upcoming trip depends. So Cicero writes to Atticus in the middle of November 55 BCE, asking for an update on the political situation in the capital.
I say “want,” but really I have to be there-it’s Milo’s wedding. I see you know that I arrived in Tusculum on November 14th.
