Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the third day before the Nones of January 707 AUC — 3 January 47 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi iii Non.\ Ian.\ a.\ 707 (47)). The letter is written on Cicero’s birthday, as he tells us in the last section, and the day weighs on every line of it. Two weeks have passed since 11.7–11.8; the new tribunate has now entered office, and Cicero realises he is held in Italy by the exceptions of Caesar’s edicts and by some clause of the recent legislation (“cum iam lege etiam sim confectus et oppressus”). Balbus’s letters, his lifeline to headquarters, are “daily more languid”; many other men’s letters are reaching Caesar against him. The accusation against himself he answers in the most absolute terms he ever puts to Atticus: “I am being ruined by my own fault; chance has brought me no evil, all has been incurred by my own doing.” He had read the war correctly — weak forces against a most prepared enemy — and had taken the course that ought “granted to others, also to be granted” to him; but he gave way to his own people, “or rather obeyed them,” and now sees what that obedience has cost.

The middle section narrates a small, devastating discovery. A bundle of letters was delivered to Cicero; he opened it on the off-chance some piece was for him. There was none — only one letter to Vatinius, another to Ligurius, both written by his brother Quintus. He had them carried on; the two addressees came back to him at once, “burning with grief,” read him the letters, full of reproaches against him. Ligurius flew into a rage: he knew that Caesar had once hated Quintus, and had even so given him a great sum of money for Cicero’s sake. Cicero, struck, asked to see what Quintus had written to others; he found more of the same. He encloses copies for Atticus, leaves it to him whether to return them to Quintus, and notes drily that the seals were broken — Pomponia, Quintus’s wife and Atticus’s sister, has his seal-ring. The letter closes with Tullia. Among all his miseries the one that stands in for all is that he is leaving her “stripped of her patrimony, of all fortune”; her mother Terentia, he now perceives, has prepared for her the same fate that is prepared for him. He begs Atticus to come, or failing that to hold Tullia commended to him and to soften Quintus, her uncle, toward her. “I have written this to you on my birthday. Would that I had never been taken up at birth, or that nothing further had been born to the same mother since! Tears prevent me from writing more.” The faint daggered crux in 1 (“benivolentie va”) is preserved at the obelus; the sense followed is “goodwill,” the most natural reading of the corruption.