Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on 12 March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano iv Id.\ Mart.\ a.\ 705 (49)). Pompey is at Brundisium and about to cross to Greece; Caesar is moving south through Italy. Cicero, still in his Formian house, finds the daily political news outrun by his own paralysis of will and confides in Atticus the device he has invented to keep his mind from itself: a small program of rhetorical θέσεις — the abstract questions of declamatory practice — recast on the very subject he cannot stop thinking about.

Section 1 sets the device: the ordinary matter of friendly letters has been shut out by the times; he has set himself certain θέσεις πολιτικαί, in Greek, “both to draw my mind off from complaint and to train myself in the very matter under deliberation.” Section 2 is the list itself — nine theses on the question of how a citizen should behave under tyranny: whether to stay, whether to overthrow, whether the overthrower himself becomes the next tyrant, whether speech and timing are surer than war, whether to side with one’s benefactors when they have not deliberated well, whether the man who has already suffered for his country is owed the right to look at last to himself and his own. Section 3 closes self-deprecatingly: he debates each side in Greek and in Latin in turn, and apologises in case the letter arrives at an awkward hour. The list is one of the most remarkable documents in the corpus: the abstract grammar of a personal crisis, set out in the impersonal Greek of the schools.