Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the third day before the Nones of February in 49 BC (the manuscript dateline as Perseus prints it reads Scr. imi Formiano iii Non. Febr. a. 705 (49), where imi is an OCR slip for in; the place is Formiae). Written the same morning as Att.~7.19 — the women have just arrived from Rome and Cicero is on the point of leaving them at the villa to head back to Capua for the Nones.

Section 1 names the dilemma exactly: whether “a shameful peace or a wretched war” — turpi pace nobis an misero bello. Pompey’s reply is reported welcome at the contio, and if Caesar refuses it he is finished; but the unfinished sentence (“if he accepts them —”) concedes that he probably will. To Atticus’s imagined question — which outcome would you prefer? — Cicero answers that he would say, if only he knew what state the Pompeian preparation was in.

Section 2 is the day’s military news: Cassius driven from Ancona, the town now ours. But Caesar, even while peace envoys are in flight, is reported to be conducting his levy acerrime, seizing positions and garrisoning them. The outburst is the most acid of the whole sequence — o perditum latronem! (“the ruined brigand!”) — before Cicero collects himself: stomachari desinamus, “let us cease to fume, let us yield to the moment, let us go with Pompey to Spain.” Section 3 picks up an old loose end (the philosopher Dionysius, the boys’ tutor, who had failed to follow Cicero out of Rome) with the dry coda that he does not exact too much of this kind from Greeks. Section 4 closes with a small but exact picture of the credit market collapsing under the crisis: even solvent debtors cannot pay because no one has cash on hand and no one will renew a loan. The pseudo- Hesiodic maxim Cicero quotes (mēde dikēn, “not even a lawsuit”) warns against pressing a friend — yet his brother’s complaint, he confesses, has moved him.