Cicero to Atticus, written from Cales on the eighth day before the Ides of February 49 BC, before dawn (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Calibus vi Id. Febr. ante lucem a. 705 (49)). The pre-dawn hour matters: Cicero has slept the night on the road back from Capua to Formiae, and is dictating in the dark before pushing on, the cold of the small hours pressed into every sentence.

Three days after Ad Atticum 7.20 the diagnosis has hardened. The recruiting officers do not dare phainoprosōpein — “to show their faces” — while Caesar is at hand; the consul who did arrive came in late, the other not at all; no one is signing up. Of Pompey he writes the line that he will write again in other letters and that posterity has remembered: ut totus iacet — “how utterly he is laid low.” Section 2 reports the tribune Cassius’s mission to fetch the consuls back to Rome to empty the inner treasury, and the impossible calculus of how they could come or go; Cicero already knows from Dolabella that Picenum is lost and that Pompey is on the point of taking ship. Section 3 is the private question — Caesar is courting him by letter, Dolabella and Caelius are reporting that he is welcome on that side — and the answering Greek, aporia, “perplexity,” is the thing that is actually tearing at him.