Cicero to Atticus, written from Minturnae on the ninth day before the Kalends of February, 24 January 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Menturnis ix K. Febr. a. 705 (49)). One day after the Formian letter; the southward retreat through Latium has reached the Liris. Labienus’s defection from Caesar has now arrived as confirmed news and is the opening note of the letter.

Section 1 is the political assessment hardening into a verdict on the war. Labienus is a hērōs — a piece of civil action more brilliant than any in memory, if only because it gave Caesar pain. But the genus belli (kind of war) is what Cicero stops to fix in his teeth: civil only in so far as it has been born of one ruined citizen’s audacity, not of any quarrel between citizens. Caesar holds the City unprotected and full of supplies; he treats temples and roofs as plunder, not as fatherland; he cannot even pretend at anything politikōs — in a statesmanlike way. The judgement on Pompey is just as sharp: astratēgētos, no strategist — a leader to whom Picenum was unfamiliar country.

Section 2 turns to the present hopelessness: two treacherously-retained legions, an unwilling levy, the time for terms lost; the ship at sea without a rudder. Section 3 is the family triage — whether to send the two boys off to Greece, what to do with Tullia and Terentia when one moment he fears barbarians coming to the City and the next remembers Dolabella is there. The question for Atticus is formally split: pros to (what is right in itself) and then with an eye to opinion, lest his women be reproached for staying when good men are leaving. Section 4 closes on Atticus’s reading of the news — the closing scholarly joke about the “riddle of the Oppii from Velia” being more obscure than the number of Plato is Cicero’s wave at the famously cryptic nuptial number of Republic 8.