Cicero to Atticus, written from the army camp at Cybistra in Cappadocia, beneath Mount Taurus, on the eleventh day before the Kalends of October (21 September) 51 BC. Of all the letters of Cicero’s governorship this is the one in which the orator who had hoped to leave Cilicia in nine months as “a second Scaevola” becomes, for the first time, a frontline general. The Parthian invasion which the earlier letters had reported as rumour is now fact: Pacorus, son of King Orodes, has crossed the Euphrates with nearly all his forces; Cassius, the quaestor-in-charge after Crassus’s death, is shut up in Antioch with the army of Syria; Bibulus, who was meant to be the new governor of Syria, has not yet so much as reached his province; and the enemy is now in Cyrrhestice, the strip of Syria immediately adjacent to Cicero’s own province. He has written to the Senate on the crisis and asks Atticus, if he is at Rome, to read the despatch and judge whether to have it delivered.

The substance of the letter is double. To the Senate (through Atticus) the appeal is for relief: not, above all, that any extension of his term be added to him “between the slaying of the victim and the laying-out on the altar” — the proverb taken from a Roman sacrifice and applied with grim exactness to a year that was meant to end in January. He wants Pompey sent out, or some other man by the spring, but no prorogation. His clearest hope is the winter, which would close the passes before the Parthians could cross over. To Atticus himself the report is steadier than one would expect: the army is small but united, the position safe and well-supplied with grain, the allies extraordinarily loyal in response to his mildness and abstinence, a Roman levy is under way, the grain is being moved into strongholds, and Deiotarus is on the way with reinforcements that will nearly double the column. “We hold firm in spirit, and, because, as it seems to us, we are taking good counsel, we have hopes also of our right arm.” The closing paragraphs — on the safety of the two boys with Deiotarus, on the postal arrangements through Epirus, on the wardship of young Brutus, which Cicero is now reduced to exhibiting rather than defending — show how the private fabric of his life is being held together in the same hand that is preparing a battle.