Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the tenth day before the Kalends of February, 23 January 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano x K. Febr. a. 705 (49)). The third letter of the Rubicon-week sequence: Cicero has come down off the road into the villa at Formiae and is taking stock — waiting for Atticus’s letters, trying to read Pompey’s mind, sounding the country-town gossip, and turning the question on himself.

Section 1 registers the post: one letter has arrived, dated 21 January, which mentions an earlier one that has not. The request is the recurring one of this week — write often, even on suspicion, and above all on what to do. Section 2 is the political readout. Cicero has seen the consul Lentulus and Libo at Formiae; the cohorts are at Luceria and Teanum and the rest in Apulia; whether Pompey will stand at Larinum or cross the sea, nobody knows. Of Caesar’s Phalarismos (the cruelty of Phalaris, the proverbial Sicilian tyrant who roasted his victims in a bronze bull) Cicero expects the worst.

Section 3 turns the question on himself in the sharpest form of the week: demittamne me penitus in causam? — shall I throw myself wholly into the cause? The Homeric tag aideomai Trōas (“I shrink from the Trojans”) is Hector’s line at Iliad 6.442; Cicero uses it, with characteristic compression, for the social and political pull of public reputation. Sections 4–6 close on what he needs from Atticus: Manius Lepidus and Lucius Torquatus both set Pompey-leaves-Italy as the limit of their endurance; Cicero wants Atticus’s own aporia, and a description of the City as it now looks — whether Pompey is missed, whether Caesar is hated — and counsel on whether Terentia and Tullia should remain in Rome, come to him, or go somewhere safe.