Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the twelfth day before the Kalends of February 47 BC — 21 January (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi xii K.\ Febr.\ a.\ 707 (47)). Cicero has now been marooned at Brundisium for the better part of a year, having recrossed from the Pompeian camp after Pharsalus and lacking either Caesar’s clear pardon or the nerve to press for it. The new wound this letter bears is family: Publius Terentius, an associate who has been deputy collector of the Asian port-duties and pasture-tax, saw young Quintus at Ephesus on 8 December and reports that the boy spoke of himself as Cicero’s bitterest enemy and showed Terentius a written speech he meant to deliver against his uncle before Caesar. The father, Cicero’s brother Quintus, has spoken in the same vein at Patrae; Cicero has already forwarded Atticus the letters in which Quintus’s furor is on display. He knows this grieves Atticus too. The thought that he will not even have room to lodge a complaint with the two of them is what twists the knife.

The second paragraph turns to the political weather, and it is uniformly bad. Reports from Africa contradict the more hopeful note Atticus had sent: the Pompeian remnant there is said to be in formidable order. Add Spain, an alienated Italy, legions whose strength and loyalty are no longer what they were, and the affairs of the city in ruin: Cicero finds his only rest in Atticus’s letters and begs him not to let them lapse, and to denounce his enemies even if he cannot bring himself to hate them — not to accomplish anything, but so that they feel that Cicero is dear to him. The letter ends on the bare date with no other business; this is the tone of all of Book 11.