Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa apparently on the ninth day before the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Formiano ix K. Mart., ut videtur, a. 705 (49)). The 21 February date falls a day or two earlier than its neighbours in the modern book-numbering (8.5 and 8.7 are both 23 February); the editors have left it where the manuscripts placed it. Cicero had just sealed the previous evening’s letter — the one he meant to send before daybreak — when the praetor C. Sosius arrived at Formiae, dropping in on the neighbouring villa of M’. Lepidus, under whom Sosius had once served as quaestor. Sosius brought a copy of a letter from Pompey to the consuls, which Cicero transcribes in full.

Pompey’s letter (section 2) reports the dispatch from L. Domitius at Corfinium and orders the consuls to bring every available force to a single rendezvous as fast as they can, leaving only the minimum garrison at Capua. Section 3 is Cicero’s reaction: di immortales, qui me horror perfudit — “Gods immortal, what horror has flooded through me.” The clause that follows is corrupt in the manuscripts (the daggers stand for nihil mutasset neglegentia hoc quod cum fortiter et diligenter tum etiam me hercule); the sense seems to be the hope that careful generalship up to now will not be undone by a sudden lapse. Section 4 is wholly private — relief that the quartan fever has left Atticus, an injunction to Pilia not to keep it longer, and a small running argument about whether Tiro’s borrowing for expenses is owed to his own scruple or to Curius’s tight-fistedness.