Cicero to Atticus, written from Epirus between the Nones and the Ides of January 48 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ in Epiro inter Non.\ et Id.\ Ian., ut videtur, a.\ 706 (48)). Cicero is by now in the Pompeian camp on the far side of the Adriatic, and the household business he left behind at Rome has begun to go bad. Anteros has brought a sealed packet from Atticus, but it tells Cicero nothing about his private affairs — because the man who managed them (unnamed: Philotimus, his manumitted agent) is neither at Rome with Atticus nor anywhere Cicero can locate. The letter is a single sustained plea: Atticus is to take Cicero’s existimatio and his household into his own hands.

The financial substance comes in 2. Cicero has 2,200,000 sesterces banked in Asia in cistophori — the silver tetradrachms of the province — and asks Atticus to use a transfer (permutatio) of that money to keep his credit good at Rome. He had trusted “the man you know I have long had every reason not to trust” (again Philotimus) and so left for Pompey’s camp without putting his affairs in order; he understood the danger too late. The letter closes with the formula that will govern the whole book: he asks to be taken wholly into Atticus’s protection, so that if the side he is on stands safe, he may stand safe along with it, and may owe his survival to Atticus’s goodwill.