Cicero to Atticus, written from Thessalonica on the Ides of June 58 BC. Quintus has left his Asian governorship before 1 May and reached Athens on 15 May. The reckoning that awaits him at Rome will be hard — a returning propraetor whose brother is now exiled and whose own conduct is open to prosecution — and Cicero’s choice has been to send him on to Rome rather than have him come to Thessalonica. §1 gives the reason: he could not bear to see his brother, with that soft heart of his (mollissimo animo), in so deep a grief, nor to display his own ruin to him, nor to be looked on; and besides, he writes, Quintus would not have been able to part from him. The image is the lictors put aside, or the embrace broken by force. The bitterness of not seeing him was the lesser of two bitternesses.

§2 carries the most direct accusation in the surviving exile letters. Atticus, who has gone to Pompey in hope, is asked sharply whether he does not yet see “by whose hand, by whose plotting, by whose villainy” Cicero was ruined — the tricolon of quorum is Pompey, Hortensius, and (in some readings) Crassus, the men who let the Clodian bill stand and whose silence Cicero now reads as betrayal. The summary is the famous antithesis non inimici sed invidi perdiderunt: “it was not enemies but men who envied us who undid us.”