Cicero to Atticus, written from the Cuman villa about the ninth day before the Kalends of May 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Cumano circ.\ ix K.\ Mai.\ a.\ 705 (49)). Caesar is in Spain; Pompey has crossed to Greece; Atticus has signalled an intention to retire to Apulia and Sipontum and to keep out of the fight tergiversando — by quiet evasion — and Cicero opens with explicit endorsement of that plan, while marking why his own case is not the same. The political diagnosis is the sharpest he has yet committed to writing: this is no longer a contest about the commonwealth but a contest about kingship, regnandi contentio, in which the more modest and upright rex has been driven out, but in which even the better claimant, if he wins, will win in Sulla’s manner and after Sulla’s example.

The middle section turns to Servius Sulpicius Rufus: a hope has been raised that Sulpicius wants a conference with him, and Cicero has dispatched his freedman Philotimus with a letter. “If he means to be a man, an admirable [Greek: synodia]” — a travelling-companionship — “but if not, we shall be the men we have always been.” Section 3 reports on a recent visit from Curio (whose judgement is that Caesar is faltering on account of his unpopularity and is worried about Sicily once Pompey begins to move) and returns again to young Quintus: greed, the expectation of a Caesarian bounty, but not, Cicero hopes, the worse crime he had feared. The closing line — “we shall regard our Epirus as ours still; but it had seemed we were going to take other courses” — glances at the estate at Buthrotum that Atticus still holds open as a possible refuge, while marking that the planned destination is now somewhere else.