Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on 10 March 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ im Formiano vi Id.\ Mart.\ a.\ 705 (49)). The letter is formally earlier than the one that, in the OCT, precedes it (9.4, of 12 March): the editorial order is canonical, not chronological. The occasion is a letter from Atticus sent on his own birthday, full of careful counsel about where Cicero should go — Adriatic or Tyrrhenian, Arpinum or Formiae, each route with its own scandal.

Section 1 reports the day’s company at the villa: Postumus and Quintus Fufius, both hurrying south to Brundisium and both denouncing Pompey and the Senate — “if I cannot bear these things in my own villa, am I to bear Curtius in the Senate-house?” Section 2 turns to the underlying question. Cicero declares the commonwealth lost. He has been angry with Pompey, more angry than with Caesar himself, because the causes of events move him more than the events: he counts back ten years of Pompeian negligence, the year of his own exile foremost, and likens that day’s anger to the Roman memory of the disaster on the Allia, more mourned than the Gallic sack itself. Section 3 then turns. Pompey’s benefits and his dignitas are remembered; Balbus’s reports have made it clear that Caesar’s whole campaign aims at Pompey’s destruction; and so Cicero casts himself as Achilles answering Thetis after the death of Patroclus — the celebrated Homer quotation (Iliad 18.96, 98–99), turned into the language of officium: such duties are worth purchasing with life itself. Section 4 closes on the optimates: he has no confidence in them, watches them give themselves over to Caesar, and waits for news from Brundisium.