Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium around the sixth day before the Kalends of May 47 BC — about 26 April (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisii circ.\ vi K.\ Mai.\ a.\ 707 (47)). Cicero has been marooned in Brundisium since the previous autumn, having crossed back to Italy after Pharsalus with Caesar’s permission but no clearance to come further north or to rejoin public life. Atticus’s last letter has stopped even pretending to console him, and Cicero does not resent the change: the consolations of the earlier letters assumed he had company in his fault, and that assumption is collapsing. The Pompeians who had taken refuge in Achaia or in Asia — the men suing for Caesar’s pardon, and even some who had not been pardoned — are reported to be sailing for Africa to join the surviving resistance under Cato and Scipio. So Cicero will be left with no partner in his choice except Laelius; and even Laelius, he notes bitterly, is in a better position, having already been formally received back.

The rest is operational. Cicero assumes Caesar must have written to Balbus and Oppius about him, and asks Atticus to sound them out: any deliverance from that quarter will not be solid, but at least some plan can be laid. He dreads being seen — not least with the son-in-law Dolabella who has come to nothing — but in present ills sees no alternative. His brother Quintus, who has been writing furiously against him, is reportedly preparing to cross to Africa with the rest; and Cicero will write to Minucius at Tarentum about the thirty thousand sesterces he is trying to raise (the Fufidian estate transactions of the previous letters are the cover). The closing sentences are textually broken: two daggered cruxes are preserved verbatim, and the sense given is the most natural reading of the corrupted text.