Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the eighth day before the Ides of March 47 BC — 8 March (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi viii Id.\ Mart.\ a.\ 707 (47)). The letter is the evening companion to a morning letter Cicero has already dispatched the same day — Cephalio brought Atticus’s note that evening, and Cicero felt one piece of business in it could not wait. Atticus has asked, evidently with some anxiety, what justification of his quitting Italy Cicero plans to put before Caesar. The answer is: no new one. Cicero has already explained, repeatedly and through many intermediaries, that he could not bear up under what people were saying. Then, however, a letter from the younger Balbus reported Caesar’s view that brother Quintus had been the lituus of Cicero’s departure — the trumpet that gave the signal — and Cicero, not yet knowing the extent of Quintus’s back-channel denunciations, had written to Caesar in Quintus’s defence. He quotes the passage verbatim in 2: it is courteously begged that nothing Quintus has done be allowed to weaken Cicero’s standing with Caesar, and that Quintus be remembered as the prime mover of the Pompeian alliance and the companion, not the guide, of the journey.

The rest of the letter is the operational background to 11.10 and 11.11. Whatever happens at his own meeting with Caesar, Cicero will be “the man I always have been” — he will not abase himself. The greater anxiety now is Africa, which Atticus has been trying to present as moving toward negotiated terms rather than victory; Cicero suspects this is reassurance rather than truth, especially with Spain now to be added. He declines, for the moment, to write to Antony or the others; nothing comes into his mind that is worth setting down. The reference to his spirits being “somewhat raised” is sardonic — it concerns the praeclaras generi actiones, the “splendid performances” of Dolabella, his son-in-law, who as tribune in 47 BC has been making conspicuous trouble. The letter closes with the small civil business of Galeo’s inheritance and a request that Atticus keep writing, even when there is no matter, because the letters themselves bring something.