Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the thirteenth day before the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano xiii K. Mart. a. 705 (49)). One day after Att.~8.1, with Atticus’s reply now in hand and burned at the lamp by which Cicero is writing this one back. The two letters together are the clearest record we have of Cicero arguing with himself about whether to follow Pompey out of Italy.

Section 1 takes up the practical matters of the day: a short, conciliatory letter sent to Caesar from Capua, on the matter of his gladiators, which Cicero would be content to have posted up in public; a second letter sent the same day, prompted by notes from Caesar and from Balbus, copy enclosed for Atticus’s inspection. Section 2 turns serious. Atticus has counselled him to remember what he has done, said, and written; Cicero will not be lectured on his own honour, because what Pompey has done in abandoning the city is, to Cicero’s mind, the most disgraceful act any leader of any nation has ever committed: “the fatherland, for which it was a glorious thing both to die and to die in.”

Section 3 is the bitter catalogue of the flight: the wandering with wives and children, the hopes placed on the breath of one ailing man, the loyalists who will in fact stay home. Section 4 brings the famous comparison with Socrates, who under the Thirty Tyrants did not set foot beyond the gate of Athens, and ends with the lamp-conceit and the unanswered question that hangs over book 8 — si de pace agetur, profecturus, si de bello, quid ero? “setting off for Pompey, if it is to be peace; if war, what shall I be?” The manuscript has a crux at †sed cur†, preserved here with the daggers; the Greek tags — mempsis “reproach” in section 1, diple for the editorial mark to look out for in section 4 — are of a piece with the conspiratorial register of these days.