Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium. The Perseus dateline reads Scr.\ Brundisi x iiii K.\ Ian.\ a.\ 706 (48) (a.d.\ xiv K.\ Ian.\ = 19 December 48 BC), which matches the body’s farewell “xiii Kal.\ Ian.” — 20 December — to within a day; the manuscript subscription on the heading thus dates the letter to the same brief Brundisian window as 11.7. (The entry in meta/works.yaml currently carries the placeholder date -0048-01-01, which is plainly wrong and should be corrected to -0048-12-19, in line with the dateline.) The letter is short, two sections, and operational. Lepta and Trebatius, both with the writer at Brundisium, will tell Atticus the rest in person; what Cicero himself writes is a renewed appeal that Atticus push Balbus and Oppius to keep writing to Caesar on his behalf, against the attacks — present and epistolary — now being mounted at headquarters.

The second section names them. Fufius Calenus (Quintus Fufius Calenus, the consul-designate Caesarian) is in Caesar’s circle and is Cicero’s bitterest enemy there. Worse, Cicero’s own brother Quintus has sent his son not merely to plead his own case before Caesar but to accuse Cicero, and Quintus himself, wherever he is, will not let off heaping abuse: people who heard him speak “certain monstrous things” at Sicyon in front of many witnesses have carried the report back to Brundisium. Cicero rehearses the bitterness only briefly, knowing that rehearsal deepens both his own distress and Atticus’s, and returns to the practical request: Balbus should be moved to send someone with this specific matter in mind, and Atticus should arrange letters in Cicero’s name to whoever he judges useful. The letter closes with the farewell “xiii Kal.\ Ian.,” the thirteenth day before the Kalends of January.