Cicero to Atticus, written from the Formian villa on the sixth day before the Kalends of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Formiano vi K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)). A very short letter, scribbled on the eve of the long-foretold interview: Trebatius is expected today, and from his report — together with Matius’s letter — Cicero will rehearse how he must speak with Caesar himself when the moment comes. Caesar has had it proclaimed even at Formiae that he wants the Senate to attend in numbers on the Kalends of April; Cicero foresees that the central pressure of the interview will be the demand that he come up to the City. The line ergo ei negandum est? sed quid praeripio? — “am I, then, to refuse him? but why do I run ahead of myself?” — catches the whole posture of the letter: the question to be put has been formulated, but the answer is held off until the man himself is in the room.

Two small matters fill the closer of the letter. Cicero has decided to give his son the toga pura (the plain white toga of manhood) at Arpinum rather than at Rome, and is turning over where exactly to go after the interview is past. And he is worried about Tiro, his freedman secretary, whose own letter makes him uneasy and whose state those coming up from the south describe as [Greek: kindyn\=od\=e], “perilous.” In the present fortune, Cicero writes, both Tiro’s service and his fidelity would be most useful — a small private anxiety threaded through the larger political dread. The letter is the last word from Formiae before the meeting; what follows in 9.18 is the post-mortem.