Cicero to Atticus, written from Capua on the Nones of February 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Capuae Non. Febr. a. 705 (49)). Cicero has ridden up from his Formian villa in heavy rain to keep the meeting the consuls had ordered, only to find that the consuls have not yet arrived, and that when they do they will arrive empty-handed and unprepared. Pompey is off at Luceria with cohorts of the Appian legions of doubtful steadiness. Caesar, by every report, is hurtling south not to fight (with whom?) but to close off any retreat.

The letter is a man being made laconic by events — “the moment itself is making me terse” — and then giving himself away with a long anxious question. Stay or flee? To stay, the winter, his lictors, and the carelessness of the leadership; to flee, his friendship with Pompey, the cause of the boni, and the disgrace of joining hands with a tyrant whose model is still unclear — Phalaris or Pisistratus. The Greek tag — kai synapothanein, “I will die with them too,” Terence adapting Menander — is the kind of literary shorthand Cicero uses with Atticus alone. The women and the young Ciceros are still at Formiae; that detail at the close is the housekeeping of a man already weighing what flight from Italy would cost.