Cicero to Atticus, written from Arcanum on the seventh day before the Ides of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Arcano vii Id.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)). A note of two sentences whose entire occasion is that Cicero, with nothing of his own to report, wants news. He lists what he is waiting to hear: whether Caesar has set out, in what state he has left the City, whom he has put in charge of each region or business in Italy, and whether the Senate has voted ambassadors to Pompey and to the consuls about peace.

The letter is plain and businesslike — no Greek, no rhetorical figure, no anxiety dressed up in literary clothes — and is the more striking for it: Cicero is still in his brother’s villa at Arcanum, where letter 10.2 left him, openly admitting that he is reduced to writing only in order to receive. The closing sentence is the same posture in a single line: “I am waiting at Arcanum until I have your news.”