Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the sixth day before the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano vi K.\ Mart.\ a.\ 705 (49)). Word has reached Formiae that Domitius Ahenobarbus, holding out at Corfinium, has surrendered himself and his men — and that Pompey, instead of marching to relieve him, is pushing on for Brundisium and a sea crossing to Greece. The letter is a single cry of disgust at that abandonment, made up almost entirely of two anaphoric catalogues of Pompey’s failings.

Section 1 is the indictment of Pompey, built as a string of pluperfects — aluerat, coeperat, probarat, pararat, reliquerat, amiserat, compegerat — one shameful verb per phase of the disaster. Section 2 stages, against that record, the brief mirage of a Pompey who might have turned and fought: Cicero imagines the honourable (to kalon) flashing before his eyes, and puts into his mouth a defiant tag from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (lines 1023–4). Then he undoes the fantasy: Pompey is in fact bidding the honourable a long farewell and making for Brundisium. The closing sentence breaks off: grief blocks him from writing more.