Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the thirteenth day before the Kalends of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano xiii K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)), the same day as 9.11. A second dispatch has overtaken the first: a letter from Lepta reports that Pompey is shut in at Brundisium by a siege-wall and that the harbour mouth is blocked by rafts. The same news is independently confirmed by Matius and Trebatius, whose couriers crossed Caesar’s at Minturnae. The report will turn out to be false — Pompey had already sailed — but Cicero does not yet know that, and the letter is written under the belief that the man whose cause he is debating joining is on the point of being taken. The tears are real, the register breaks; “so help me, for the tears, I cannot think out the rest.”

Section 2 turns aside for a flash of contempt for Dionysius, the Greek freedman tutor of Cicero’s son and nephew, who has thrown over the household now its fortune has fallen: not Panaetius to Cicero’s Scipio after all. Section 3 sets the unbearable contrast: the army of the Roman people lays siege to Pompey, and meanwhile in Rome the praetors give judgement, the aediles get up the games, the honest men enter up their interest payments — “and I myself sit still.” The letter closes on the wish for “the Mucian end” (Q.\ Mucius Scaevola the pontifex, killed in the Marian terror of 82), and the bleak last sentence: nothing left to wish for, except to be set free by some mercy of an enemy.