Cicero to Atticus, written from Ephesus on the Kalends of October 50 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Ephesi K. Oct. a. 704 (50)). Cicero is on the homeward journey from his Cilician command, held up at Ephesus by the Etesian winds and by the slow Rhodian open ship, having lost a full twenty days to weather on the run from the eastern Aegean. The letter is composed in the rush of embarkation: he had just set himself down to write when Batonius arrived from a ship with Atticus’s own letter in hand, so the despatch becomes both reply and bulletin — handed off, as he sails, to Lucius Tarquitius, who is leaving the harbour at the same time in a lighter vessel and will get to Italy ahead of him.

The political news Batonius carries is the news that will define the rest of the year: Caesar will not dismiss his army, the praetors-designate are with him, the tribune Cassius is with him, the consul Lentulus is with him, and Pompey is rumoured to be contemplating the abandonment of Rome. Cicero registers the report in flat reportorial Latin — spero falsa, sed certe horribilia — and turns the same sentence into the diagnostic that will shape the next year. Around this core sit the homeward family items: the wedding talk on Tullia’s marriage to Dolabella that Pilia has just relayed, the unresolved question of the triumph that Cicero now half-wants because Bibulus (who, all the time there was an enemy in Syria, did not step beyond the gate any more than beyond his own front door) is now exerting himself for one — this would be aischron, disgraceful — and an acid little parenthesis about the nephew Quintus, “that man who is in the habit of setting himself above the uncle of your sister’s son.”