Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the eighth day before the Kalends of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano viii K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)), and continued through the day: a follow-on to letter 9.14 written within hours. Pompey has sailed from Brundisium on the Ides of March; Caesar is moving up Italy; the dreaded meeting is at hand. A fresh dispatch from Capua corrects yesterday’s schedule: Caesar will now be at the Alban villa with Curio on the fifth day before the Kalends — that is, the twenty-eighth, three days off. Cicero has decided that after the interview he will go on to Arpinum; if Caesar grants him the indulgence he is asking (the leave not to sit in a Senate summoned by Caesar’s hand) he will take the terms, and if not he will fall back on himself. He notes the legions posted at Brundisium, Tarentum, and Sipontum, and the inference that Caesar is closing the seaward exits and aiming for Greece rather than Spain.

The second section is the constitutional dread. Caesar will want a senatus consultum, a decree of the augurs, a praetor to put the consular question, perhaps a dictator named: “neither of these is lawful,” but if Sulla could have it done through an interrex, why not this one? The grim parallel between Sulla and Caesar runs under the whole letter. Cicero foresees only one of two fates — to be killed by Caesar like Quintus Mucius Scaevola, or by Pompey like Lucius Cornelius Scipio. Section 3 takes its motto from Odysseus’s address to his own heart: [Greek: t\’etlathi k\’unteron], “endure, more dog-hearted still” — and the bitterness is that even that line, once a private possession, no longer fits his case, because there is no hope of return to wait through. Section 4 closes with another Homeric tag, Telemachus’s resignation that “some things he himself, some things the divine power will suggest.” Section 5 is a domestic eruption: Atticus has hinted that Cicero was too sharp about Dionysius (the freedman tutor who had abandoned the boys at a bad moment); Cicero declines to soften. The letter is closed in section 6 by the dispatch of Matius and Trebatius, who set down Caesar’s itinerary day by day — Beneventum, Capua, Sinuessa — and confirm that Pompey is gone. Several daggered cruxes in the transmitted text have been kept as obeli.