Cicero to Atticus, written as he was setting out into exile, March or April 58 BC. The shortest of all the Atticus letters, and the first of the exile correspondence. The political picture has by this point collapsed: P. Clodius is tribune (entered office 10 December 59 BC), has carried at the start of his year the lex Clodia de capite civis Romani — a bill threatening exile for any magistrate who had put a Roman citizen to death without trial — and Cicero, the consul of 63 who had executed the Catilinarian conspirators on the senatorial decree of 5 December, is that bill’s target.

The “bill” Cicero refers to is the second Clodian law, naming Cicero by name, banning him from fire and water within four hundred miles of Italy. “The law on the province of Macedonia having been carried” refers to Clodius’s gift-bill assigning Macedonia to L. Calpurnius Piso (the consul of 58 BC, Caesar’s father-in-law) — which had the practical effect of removing him from Rome and freeing Atticus, owner of estates in Epirus, to come and meet Cicero on the way. The route Cicero is contemplating is the same overland route through Epirus that he in fact took: across to Brundisium, across the strait, north along the coast to Epirus or Macedonia, eventually to Thessalonica, where he would spend most of his exile. The bill of 3.1 cleared the last political obstacle to that route.

The next surviving letters — Att. 3.2–3.27, Q. fr. 1.3–1.4, Fam. 14.1–14.4 — are the exile correspondence of 58 BC, written from the journey, from Thessalonica, and from Dyrrachium, and are the darkest stretch of Cicero’s surviving prose.