Cicero to Atticus, written from the Cuman villa in the middle of April 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Cumano medio m.\ Apr.\ a.\ 705 (49)). A short note, openly compressed: “this one is brief, because I was in a hurry and rather pressed.” Cicero has crossed from Formiae to his villa at Cumae and is waiting on the weather to put to sea. He has, characteristically, already written out his whole thinking in a previous letter (now Att.\ 10.4); this is only the cover sheet. The opening assurance — nothing cunning, whatever Spain turns into — is the strain that runs through this whole stretch of the correspondence: the public report that he is still deliberating is the camouflage; the private fact, told only to Atticus, is that he means to sail to Pompey as soon as the weather and the coastguard allow.

Section 2 returns to the long-running anxiety about young Quintus, his nephew, whom Cicero is trying to keep in hand and whose father (Quintus the elder) is, in Cicero’s view, too indulgent to be any help. The judgement on the boy is bleak — “many strange things; nothing straightforward, nothing sincere” — and the request to Atticus is half a regret: I wish you had taken him over yourself. Section 3 is the one piece of operational news that has come in: Pompey is reported to be setting out for Gaul through Illyricum. The brisk closing sentence (“I shall now look to by what route and where”) stages the choice that the next several letters will keep refining: which sea, which port, which moment to make the crossing.