Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa about the fourth or third day before the Ides of February 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano iv aut iii Id. Febr. a. 705 (49); the later end is used here). Atticus is in Rome. Cicero, on his coastal command, is reading the news in two streams that contradict one another — the bleak report Lucretius has sent from Capua to Cassius, and the more cheerful note Cephalio has just brought from Atticus — and he believes the bleak one.

The note is a single section, half political diary, half lament. The famous line is here: Pompey malas causas semper obtinuit, in optima concidit — “He carried his bad causes through always; in the best of causes he has collapsed.” Behind it is the Stoic-sounding judgement that governing the commonwealth aright is itself a difficult art, an ars difficilis for which Pompey, on this showing, had no training. The closing promise that more will be known at any moment and at once written — iam iamque omnia sciemus et scribemus ad te statim — is the running protocol of these days.