Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the Kalends of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano in K.\ Mart.\ a.\ 705 (49)). The most considered of the letters of this fortnight, and the one that brings the political crisis into contact with Cicero’s own philosophical work. With Caesar racing south through Apulia and Pompey poised at Brundisium to cross to Greece, Cicero turns back to De Re Publica and the portrait of the moderator rei publicae drawn there — the “ruler of the commonwealth” whose end is the prosperous and honourable life of the citizens — and measures the actual leadership of both men against it. Neither, he concludes, is governed by that goal; both want to reign. Dominatio quaesita ab utroque est.

Section 1 opens with the studied composure: he is agitated but not so agitated as Atticus thinks, and he is spending his time considering the figure of the ideal statesman “drawn out with sufficient care” in his own books. The quotation that follows is Scipio’s in the fifth book of De Re Publica — helmsman to a fair course, physician to health, general to victory, ruler of the commonwealth to the prosperous life of the citizens — and the “bringer-to-completion” of that work is the figure Cicero now no longer sees in Roman public life. Section 2 brings Pompey’s conduct into focus: not retreat under necessity but design from the first — to set every land and sea in motion, to bring in barbarian kings and savage tribes, to assemble the largest of armies. This is the genus Sullani regni (“Sullan kingship”), long the aim of many of those around him. Section 3 is the prophecy — not as a Cassandra-figure (“that one whom no one believed”), but by reasoned conjecture — an Iliad of evils [Greek: Ilias] hangs over Italy. Section 4 makes that vision concrete: Italy trodden underfoot next summer by slave conscripts gathered from every type. Sections 5–7 close on the daily business — Caesar’s letter, the younger Balbus’s mission to Lentulus, Pompey’s two careless letters which Cicero has answered with care and forwards in copy, and a request that Atticus send him the book of Demetrius of Magnesia “On Concord.” The closing line — vides quam causam mediter — shows where the writing has been tending all along.