Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano xv K. Mart. a. 705 (49)). This is the closing letter of Ad Atticum book 7; with book 8 the picture darkens again. For a moment here it has brightened: news has come in from Rome of Domitius’s stand and of the Picene cohorts; Afranius too is well reported; Caesar’s threats are being met with quotation rather than panic.

Section 1 catches that brief lift — the flight being prepared has been checked; Caesar’s interdict, an Ennian-tasting line about being found “on a second day’s light,” is being thrown back at him. Section 2 is Cicero answering Atticus on his own political standing. The two-edged sentence — ego me ducem in civili bello quoad de pace ageretur negavi esse, non quin rectum esset sed quia quod multo rectius fuit id mihi fraudem tulit — is the self-knowledge of a man who has chosen one position over another and is paying for it. The quoted phrase pro tuis rebus gestis amplissimis is the formula in which Pompey, before all this, would have moved Cicero’s second consulship and triumph.

Section 3 closes book 7 with the running business — a money matter Terentia has answered; Dionysius the tutor and his obligations; the boys (Marcus and the younger Quintus) likely to winter at Formiae — and then the personal decision, made plain: si enim erit bellum, cum Pompeio esse constitui. “If there is to be a war, I have decided to be with Pompey.” What follows that line, in book 8, is the trying-out of the decision.