Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of January 706 AUC — 19 December 48 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi xiv Kal.\ Ian.\ a.\ 706 (48)). Pharsalus is five months past. Pompey has been murdered in Egypt; Cato and the surviving optimates have regrouped in Africa; Caesar is still in Alexandria. Cicero, having declined to follow the war into Africa, has crossed back to Italy on Dolabella’s advice and is held at Brundisium under what amounts to internal exile, his lictors still in attendance — an ambiguous honour he half wants to keep and half wants gone. The letter is long, eight sections, and ranges through the whole of his post-Pharsalus predicament: the question of whether he was entitled to retain his lictors (Sestius’s precedent cuts both ways); the bare fact, just notified him by Antonius, that Caesar has ordered Cato and L. Metellus barred from Italy and all returning Pompeians held off pending personal review, with Cicero and Laelius named by name as exceptions in Antonius’s edict — a singling-out he would have preferred to do without. Then the longer self-justification of 3: he is being reproached for not having sailed to Africa with the republican remnant; his answer is that the commonwealth ought not to be defended by the barbarian auxiliaries of a treacherous nation (Juba’s Numidians) against a veteran Caesarian army. He sees the trap clearly: if the Africans win, he is finished; if they lose, their wound is at least the honourable one. “Haec me excruciant.”

The second half turns to Atticus’s role as intermediary. Sulpicius’s quietism, though less glorious than Cato’s stand, is free of both danger and distress; the Achaian remnant is better off than Cicero only because there are many of them in one place and a return to Italy means a return home. Atticus is to keep mitigating, keep winning approval where he can, and above all keep Balbus and Oppius writing to Caesar on Cicero’s behalf, against the unnamed enemies (his brother Quintus, his nephew, and others) who are reporting to Caesar that Cicero repents his course or disapproves of what is being done. Section 6 breaks the letter open: Atticus has written that Tullia is demanding he come, and Cicero, who has not seen his daughter since before Pharsalus and knows she is in a wretched marriage and worse finances, cannot keep writing for tears. “Lacrimae enim se subito profuderunt.” He leaves the decision to Atticus, asks his pardon, and signs off with the closing of an exile who has been brought to depend on a friend for everything: write openly, write often. The dateline “x iiii K.\ Ian.” makes this and 11.8 effectively a same-day pair from Brundisium.