Cicero to Atticus, written from his Formian villa about the 21st of December 50 BC. The Perseus dateline as transmitted reads Scr. in Formiano inter xiiii et x K. Iun. a. 704 (50) — “between the 14th and 10th days before the Kalends of June” — which is impossible: in May 50 BC Cicero was in Cilicia, not at Formiae. The accepted reading, following Shackleton Bailey, is that Iun. here is a copyist’s or OCR error for Ian.; the letter belongs to the December cluster, slotting between 7.6 (19 December) and 7.8 (27/28 December). The text itself fixes Dionysius’s arrival to the 15th day before the Kalends of January, i.e. 18 December, and points forward to the journey toward Rome already laid out in 7.5. We date the sidecar to 21 December, a mid-range placeholder.

The letter survives with gaps: sections 2 and 5 are absent from the transmitted text, and a noun in section 1 is locally corrupt (†putato†). The argument runs all the same. Section 1 picks up the long-running thread of Atticus’s freedman Dionysius, who has now reached Rome and delivered an Atticus letter; Cicero notes wryly that his earlier warm testimony forbids him a palinōidia, a recantation. Section 3 dovetails into travel logistics: he will not arrive at Pompey’s Alban villa on the Compitalia (so as not to disrupt the household festival) and asks Atticus not to exert himself on account of the quartan fever. Section 4 opens the political core: rumor has it that Pompey’s council mean to send Cicero into Sicily on the strength of the still-active Cilician imperium he carries; Cicero retorts that this is Abdēritikon, “Abderite logic” (the Abderites were a Thracian byword for stupidity), since neither Senate nor people have decreed any such thing. He then turns to a withering anatomy of who exactly the “loyalists” (boni) are supposed to be: the senators who failed to break Curio? the publicans now on Caesar’s payroll? the financiers? the farmers, who care only for quiet?

Sections 6 and 7 are the famous resolution. Resisting Caesar now is resisting a man we ourselves armed, by every prior concession; the moment to have stopped him was when he was weak, and that moment is past. Behind him stand eleven legions, the Transpadanes, the urban plebs, “so many tribunes of the plebs, a youth so utterly corrupted, a commander of such authority, of such audacity.” Either we fight or we let his candidacy stand under the law; “fight, then, rather than be a slave,” Atticus is imagined as saying — but if you lose you are proscribed and if you win you are still a slave. So Cicero will do as cattle do: he will follow the herd of his kind. The play of registers ends on the Senate-floor formula, dic, M. Tulli, “Say your piece, Marcus Tullius” — and the punch-line: “I assent to Gnaeus Pompeius, that is, to Titus Pomponius.” He owes the loyalist line not to its merits but to his oldest friend. And then, mid-thought, the lamp fails (me lucerna deserit) and the letter ends with greetings to Atticus’s slave-boy Alexis.