Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the day before the Nones of November 48 BC — 4 November (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi pr.\ Non.\ Nov.\ a.\ 706 (48); works.yaml currently records 5 November for this letter, but pridie Nonas is 4 November). The political ground has shifted entirely since 11.4: Pompey is dead, killed on the Egyptian shore on 28 September, and Cicero has come back to Italy on the strength of his right to use the imperium of a returning proconsul. He has landed at Brundisium without the cause and without his colleagues, and sits there now exposed — to Caesar’s pleasure, to the resentment of the remaining Pompeians, and to the suspicion of Antony, who holds Italy in Caesar’s absence.

The letter is in four short sections. 1 is the apology he will give again and again over the next year for having quit the Pompeian camp: the causes were so bitter and so heavy and so unprecedented that he acted “by a kind of impulse of the mind rather than by deliberation,” and they produced what Atticus can now see. He understands from Atticus’s letters that Atticus is hunting for new ways to protect him. 2 declines, gently, Atticus’s suggestion that he come closer to Rome travelling by night through the towns: he has no lodgings suitable for hiding by day, and for the purpose he is wanted it hardly matters whether he is seen on the road or in a town. 3 explains why he has written so little: distress of mind and body has kept him from finishing letters; he asks Atticus to write in his name to Basilus, Servilius, and anyone else who seems fit. 4 answers a query about Vatinius (any goodwill is welcome, if anyone can find a way to use it), then reports that his brother Quintus met him at Patrae in a thoroughly hostile frame of mind, that his nephew joined Quintus there from Corcyra, and that the two of them must have set out from Patrae with the rest of the Pompeian remnant. The rupture with Quintus will dominate the rest of Book 11.