Cicero to Atticus, written from the Cuman villa on the fourteenth or thirteenth day before the Kalends of June 49 BC — 19 or 20 May (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Cumano xiv aut xiii K.\ Iun.\ a.\ 705 (49)). The letter opens with the household’s one piece of private news: Tullia, on the fourteenth day before the Kalends (19 May), has given birth to a seven-months boy. The technical Greek does the social work — the delivery itself was easy ([Greek: eutok\=esen]), which Cicero is glad of, but the child born is perimbecillum, “desperately weak,” and is not expected to live. Around this domestic fact the political weather hardens. A spell of extraordinary calm at sea has held Cicero in the bay — more effectively, he notes drily, than the watchers Caesar has set on him. The Hortensius hopes of the previous letter have collapsed: the young proconsul has been corrupted by his freedman Salvius and is now worthless. Cicero announces a change of practice that the rest of Book 10 will keep: he will report only what he has done, never what he is about to do, because every [Greek: K\=orukaios] — every eavesdropper of Corycus, in the proverb — seems to be listening in on what he says.

The rest is bleak operational housekeeping. Cicero still wants any news from Spain or anywhere else, and tells Atticus to write without waiting on letters back; he himself will write only when he has arrived where he means to go, or if something turns up en route — and even this he sets down timidly, so slow and so thick is everything. “As we have made a bad beginning, so the rest follows.” He is now leaving for Formiae (perhaps, he says, the Furies will follow him there too). From Balbus’s conversation with Atticus he gathers that the Malta plan is disapproved in Caesar’s camp: clearly Caesar reckons him among the enemy. He has written to Balbus relaying what Atticus reported, both the goodwill and the suspicion; Atticus is to thank Balbus on his behalf and clear him on the second point. The letter ends in the darkest register of the whole book — “Has there ever been a more unlucky man than I?” — with Cicero saying he will spare Atticus the rest, and confessing that the moment has come when he can no longer act either bravely or prudently. Two short cruxes in 1 are preserved as \ markers; the sense given is the most natural reading of the corrupted text.