Cicero to Atticus, written from the Pompeian villa on the fourth or third day before the Ides of December 50 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Pompeiano iv aut iii Id. Dec. a. 704 (50)). One or two days after the long Trebula letter, with Cicero now further up the coast at his own villa near Pompeii. The opening discharges a small piece of household business: he is sending Dionysius back to Atticus (“burning with longing for you”) with a careful character reference that ends in the half-deprecating, half-emphatic plane virum bonum — plainly a good man, even though he is a freedman.

The substance is the report of an interview with Pompey himself: two hours together on the fourth day before the Ides of December. On the triumph, Pompey was warm and helpful, with practical advice not to enter the Senate before the matter was settled. On the commonwealth, he was already talking as though the war were not in doubt and concord beyond reach — the proof he offered was a small but diagnostic incident: Hirtius, Caesar’s intimate, had come into Rome on the evening of the eighth, an arrangement had been made for him to meet Scipio before dawn on the seventh, and he had instead slipped away in the dead of night to Caesar. Pompey called this tekmeriōdes, evidentiary, of the breach. The letter closes with the same forced consolation Cicero will repeat for weeks — that the man on whom even his enemies have bestowed a second consulship will surely not be tam amens, so deranged, as to push it to the extremity — and the bald aside that he fears many things he does not dare put in writing. His own plan: to be at the city by the third day before the Nones of January.