Cicero's Letters to Atticus

Atticus's letters are lost, so what survives is one half of a conversation carried on for more than twenty years, and it is the unguarded half. Cicero writes to his oldest friend the way nobody writes for posterity: asking what on earth he should do, despising himself for asking, slipping into Greek when the Latin feels too exposed, fretting about his brother, his wife, the statues he wants bought in Athens, Caesar arriving for lunch at his villa with two thousand soldiers.