Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the fourth day before the Kalends of December 48 BC — 28 November (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi iv K.\ Dec.\ a.\ 706 (48), and the date is repeated at the foot of the letter itself). Three weeks have passed since 11.5; Cicero is still pinned at Brundisium and still defending, to Atticus and to himself, the decision to leave Pompey’s camp. The letter is more substantial than the previous one, more articulate, and considerably darker. It opens with the grief that doubles when shared (1): Atticus approves the decision, says the men who matter approve it too — but if Cicero really believed that, “I should feel the pain less.”

The centre of the letter (2) is the harshest formal apologia for Pharsalus-side defection that Cicero ever puts on paper. The Pompeian camp, he insists, had become something foreign to the republic: cruelty so unbounded, and so close a coupling with barbarian peoples, that a proscription had been “sketched out not by name but by class,” with the property of every senator who had stayed in Italy already counted as booty of the coming victory. He does not regret the will, only the plan: better to have sat down in some town and waited to be summoned than to lie at Brundisium — exposed on every side — and unable now to move closer without lictors he cannot lawfully shed. The section ends in two short, manuscript-corrupt clauses preserved here as \ markers, the second of which has resisted convincing emendation; the sense given is the most natural reading of the corrupted text. 3 turns to operational matters: he has written to Oppius and Balbus to ask in what manner he ought to come nearer to Rome, and floats the idea that Trebonius, Pansa, and others write to Caesar endorsing his action as taken on the recommendation of Caesar’s own circle. 4 is the single private cry of the letter — Tullia is ill, and the illness is undoing him. 5 is the dignified, unsurprised notice of Pompey’s death (“About Pompey’s end I never had a doubt”), with one of the gentlest valedictions Cicero ever gives a dead political opponent. 6 collects what news there is from elsewhere: Fannius has been talking dangerously about Atticus’s having stayed in Italy; Lentulus had already parcelled out the spoils in his head (Hortensius’s house, Caesar’s gardens, Baiae); the two sides, he notes drily, are not very different except that the other was without limit. He hears Quintus has gone to Asia to plead his case and has no news of his nephew. The letter closes with a request for letters back as soon as possible, and the Brundisium dateline.