Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the seventh day before the Kalends of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano vii K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)). The next day’s note, two days before the meeting at Formiae. Cicero has nothing particular to say but keeps to the discipline of letting no day pass without a letter. The body of it is the verbatim copy of a fresh letter from Caesar himself, answering Cicero’s congratulations on the famous clemency at Corfinium.

Caesar’s letter is short and remarkable: he hears Cicero’s praise with pleasure, denies that cruelty is in his nature, dismisses the report that some of the men he let go from Corfinium have made off to fight him again — “I want nothing more than that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.” It is the model of Caesar’s politic self-presentation, and Cicero, who has just been foretelling Sullan kingship and the Mucius–Scipio choice in letter 9.15, lets it pass without comment. Section 3 closes with a note on Dolabella, Atticus’s son-in-law, whose kindness Cicero takes for granted “because he cannot do otherwise.”