Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the fourth day before the Nones of February in 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano iv Non. Febr. a. 705 (49)). Cicero is back at Formiae, having returned from Capua a day or two earlier and waiting for Terentia and Tullia to join him; the consuls have summoned him back to Capua again for the Nones, three days off.

The letter is the longest of this five-day cluster and the most analytic. Section 1 opens with a dry joke about city property values (no one, Cicero says, has knocked so much off them as Pompey has): Atticus need not flee Rome with him. Section 2 is the political reading. Lucius Caesar, sent as intermediary, is shuttling Pompey’s reply back to Caesar; the reply is conciliatory enough to be posted in public, and Cicero is furious that Pompey — himself an able writer — has let it be drafted by Sestius, whose stilted style yields the coinage Sēstiōdesteron (“more Sestius-like” than anything ever read). The substance is worse than the style: “nothing is being refused to Caesar.” Caesar will likely take the deal — yet Cicero already fears he will not be content with terms this favourable, since he is reported to be acerrimus, at his most ferocious, even as the answers come back.

Sections 3–4 turn personal. Trebatius writes that Caesar, on hearing of Cicero’s withdrawal from Rome, began to fret at the senatorial absences and asked Trebatius to recall him to the city; Cicero is struck that Caesar approached him via the obscure jurist Trebatius rather than directly or through Dolabella or Caelius. He writes back that he will stay on his own estates so long as there is hope of peace — but if war comes, he will not fail his duty or his dignity, with the boys (his son and nephew) hypektithemenos, “smuggled out for safekeeping,” to Greece. Section 5 records the day’s domestic detail: the women are on the road, Rome is reported more frightened than before, and he must turn round again for Capua at the Nones.