Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of September 47 BC — 17 August (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi xvi K.\ Sept.\ a.\ 707 (47)). The letter opens on news that has finally crossed the Adriatic. On the day before this one, the seventeenth day before the Kalends, a freedman of C.\ Trebonius arrived, twenty-eight days out of Seleucia in Pieria, having seen Cicero’s nephew Quintus with Hirtius in Caesar’s company at Antioch: the two have obtained for Quintus the elder everything they wanted, and got it without difficulty.

The relief is cut short the moment Cicero takes it in. The pardon would do more to ground a considered hope if there were not other Quintuses to fear — and if what this one Caesar grants did not remain in his power, like a master’s, to take back. Even Sallustius has been pardoned. Caesar is said to refuse no one absolutely, which is itself suspect: recognition of him (the formal notitio, the audience in which the new dispensation is acknowledged and the suppliant’s standing fixed) is put off. M.\ Gallius has restored the slaves to Sallustius; he is in Brundisium to ferry legions across to Sicily. Caesar himself will go straight on from Sicily to Patrae — if so, Cicero will shift somewhere closer, which is what he had wanted all along. He is waiting urgently for Atticus’s reply to his last request for advice. The signed dateline is preserved.