Cicero to Atticus, written from his Formian villa on the sixth or fifth day before the Kalends of January, i.e. 27 or 28 December 50 BC (Perseus dateline: Scr. in Formiano vi aut v K. Ian. a. 704 (50)). The report letter after a face-to-face meeting with Pompey: the political content of the cluster suddenly thickens, because for the first time in months Cicero has spoken with the man he is bound to follow.

The first three sections discharge domestic items. He drops the Dionysius quarrel on Atticus’s say-so; he is glad Atticus can come to him at the Alban villa, but begs him not to make the journey if the quartan is on him; and he turns over, as a politikon skemma “civic problem,” whether Dolabella, just installed as Tullia’s husband, ought to take a new name under Livia’s will. The lawyer’s note is characteristic: settle the principle once we know the actual sum involved (“how much, so to speak, lies in a third of a third”).

Section 4 is the heart. Pompey caught up with him at Lavernium on the 26th and the two rode on to Formiae, where from the eighth hour to evening (about 2 p.m. until dark) they conferred in private. The headline finding: Pompey does not wish for a peaceful settlement. Either Caesar, even on dismissing his army, would be a consul who would produce sunchusin tēs politeias, “a dissolution of the constitution”; or, hearing of the preparations against him, he would simply hold on to province and army. Pompey is confident in his own forces and in the commonwealth’s, and contemptuous of Caesar should he “go mad.” Cicero records his own private flicker — the Homeric xunos Enualios, “Enyalios is impartial” (Iliad 18.309), his caveat against confidence in war — but says he was lifted, all the same, by hearing a brave man speak politikōs of the dangers of a sham peace. They read together the speech that Antony, as Caesar’s quaestor and tribune, had delivered before the assembly on the 23rd of December, an indictment of Pompey from boyhood, with menace of arms. The letter ends in self-disgust: Cicero owes Caesar money, and the dowry-apparatus he had earmarked for his triumph must now go to pay the debt. “It is an ugly thing to be debtor to one’s political opponent.”