Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa, before daybreak on the eighth day before the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano viii K. Mart. ante lucem a. 705 (49)). A short, sharp letter dominated by ingratitude. Dionysius, the freedman scholar whom Atticus had recommended as tutor to the two young Ciceros, has now declined to follow the household into whatever exile is coming — and has done it, Cicero feels, rudely, after years of laboured cultivation. The opening sentence puts him at once into Atticus’s column, not his own: Dionysius quidem tuus potius quam noster.

Section 1 reviews the long courtship: the honours, the indulgences, the published letters in which (Cicero says) you would think Dicaearchus or Aristoxenus was being invited to come, not “the single most garrulous human being alive and the least apt at teaching.” Section 2 imagines, with characteristic self-amusement, what Dionysius will go around saying (“He has a good memory” — “He will tell people that I have a better”), then registers the offence in forensic terms: never has Cicero himself refused so flatly any defendant, however squalid, as Dionysius has refused him. Section 3 returns abruptly to the war. The ship is ready; Cicero is waiting for Atticus’s reply to the deliberation of 8.3; and a fresh despatch has come in — Atius the Paelignian has opened the gates of Sulmo to Antony despite a garrison of five cohorts, Q. Lucretius has fled, and Pompey is making for Brundisium. The last clause carries a manuscript crux but the sense is unmistakable: confecta res est — “the business is finished.”