Cicero to Atticus, written from Arpinum on the day before the Kalends of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Arpini prid.\ K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)). Three days after the interview with Caesar at the Formian villa, Cicero is at his birthplace among his townsfolk. The opening note is domestic and ceremonial: he has given his son the toga pura at Arpinum, “since we are kept from Rome” (quoniam Roma caremus), and the people of the municipium received it kindly. But the rite of passage opens onto the same view the rest of the letter takes: everyone along the road downcast and stricken, levies being held, marched into winter quarters, and a sense that the [Greek: anathe\=or\=esis] — the second look one takes at the enormity once the first shock is past — is grimmer than the first sight had been.

Section 2 is the resolution that the interview crystallised: he will set out to Pompey after all, not for the sake of a commonwealth he judges destroyed, nor with any real hope, but to keep himself clear of the charge of ingratitude and because he cannot bear to look at what is happening here. The dispatch by Servius Sulpicius Rufus of his son to attack or capture Pompey at Brundisium — alongside Pontius Titinianus — is called out with cold disgust: the son perhaps acted out of fear, “but the father?” Section 3 sketches the practical route: the upper sea (the Adriatic) is blockaded; he will sail by the lower (the Tyrrhenian); if Puteoli is closed he will make for Croton or Thurii; the sea itself, he writes with bitter inversion, will be his hostile country, since he and the other good citizens, lovers of their fatherland, can find no welcome on land. The mention of Egypt at the section’s close is the bleakest fall-back: “We shall take ourselves off into Egypt.” Section 4 closes with a gratitude to Atticus that is both real and forensic: the two pieces of counsel that bore — gravity at the interview and refusal to come up to the City — have both held. The unbroken Formiae diary of weeks is over; the next letter is from a man already turned, in his mind, toward the coast.