Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the fourth day before the Nones of March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano iv Non.\ Mart.\ a.\ 705 (49)). This is the closing letter of Ad Atticum book 8 — the same end-of-book dramatic function that 7.26 served the month before, and a much darker note to close on. Everything has been provided, Cicero begins, except a hidden and safe road to the Adriatic; the Tyrrhenian sea is unusable in early March. Section 1 hardens the verdict on Pompey: not the man who seems to lead me, apolitikotaton (least political) of all men, recognised so long since, but now also astrategetotaton (most lacking in generalship). What pulls him on is sermo hominum — talk of men — carried in reports from Philotimus that the optimates are tearing him to pieces for staying. The reply to that is the withering parenthesis on those same optimates, who are hurrying out to meet Caesar and selling themselves to him by the town.

Section 2 calls Caesar hic Pisistratus — the tyrant of Athens analogy, the textbook example of a tyrannos who came in clemently and stayed on as ruler — and observes that whatever evil he does not do will be received as a favour. The 360 jurors who once acquitted Milo and stood with Pompey now shudder at nescio quas eius Lucerias — “certain Lucerias of his,” the rumoured proscription list Pompey was said to be drawing up at his Apulian camp. The Homeric aidéomai (“I feel shame before them”) concedes the pull of the senatorial cause even as the sentence that follows guts it: he is joining himself with a man more prepared to ravage Italy than to win the war, and waiting for a master. If Caesar should come up the Appian Way, Cicero is thinking of Arpinum — his own hill town, far from any road between Brundisium and Rome. Book 8 ends on that contingency: the master’s route is the geometry of Cicero’s next move.