Cicero to Atticus, written from his Formian villa on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of January, 18 December 50 BC (Perseus dateline: Scr. in Formiano xv K. Ian. a. 704 (50)). The first of an unbroken sequence of Formian letters in the closing weeks of the year: Cicero has landed in Italy, set himself up at the suburban villa just off the Appian Way, and is feeding Atticus running bulletins as the crisis with Caesar comes to its head. He is still waiting on a supplicatio for his Cilician campaign, and a hoped-for triumph, and is keeping out of the City until matters at Rome clarify; meanwhile he listens to whatever rumor walks in the door.

The substantive content is in sections 4 and 5. The upper sections are domestic — worry about Atticus’s and Pilia’s quartan fever, and about his freedman Tiro’s health (“it is for his humanity and modesty that I would rather have him safe than for my own use of him”); a travel itinerary from Formiae over the Pomptine marshes to Pompey’s Alban villa and so to Rome by his birthday, the 3rd of January. Then the lid comes off: “About the commonwealth I grow more afraid by the day. For the loyalists, as people suppose them, are not of one mind. What Roman knights, what senators I have seen, who poured abuse on Pompey for everything else, but above all for this journey of his! Peace is what we need. From victory there will come many evils and surely a tyrant.” Section 5 then closes the position. “I am of the school which holds it more useful to concede what he demands than to join battle. We resist too late one whom for ten years we have nourished against ourselves.” The Greek leave-taking, apotripsai, “shake off,” the quartan ague — restores the affectionate tone the politics had broken.