Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the evening of the ninth or the morning of the tenth of February 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano v Id. Febr. vesp. aut iv Id. a. 705 (49)). A day after Ad Atticum 7.22 a letter has reached Cicero from his freedman Philotimus at Rome with the kind of news that bends the room back upright: Domitius has a strong army, cohorts from Picenum have joined him, Caesar can perhaps be cut off. Manius Lepidus, Lucius Torquatus and the tribune Cassius, all of whom have washed up at the Formian villa, are revived by it.

Cicero is not. He records the bulletin, says he is afraid it is a dream, and then writes the sentence the dream is hiding: Caesarem Pompeium persequi. “Caesar pursuing Pompey? What for? To kill him? O wretched me!” The triple victi, oppressi, capti plane sumus — “we are beaten, crushed, taken outright” — is the honest reading. Section 2 is the housekeeping that the bulletin alters: he had been about to send the women back to Rome but reverses the order, because sending them would be read in town as his having already given up the public cause, the first step of his own homecoming. He will stay; for Pompey he can die “both with piety and with gladness” — and the unfinished half-line, etsi vivere—, “though to go on living —,” is one of the most desolate sentences he ever wrote. Section 3 closes with the levy at Capua flat on the floor, a copy of Caesar’s letter enclosed because Atticus had asked, and the private settlement: many tell me I am acceptable to him, which I am content to bear, dum ut adhuc nihil faciam turpiter.