Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the sixth or fifth day before the Kalends of September 47 BC — 27 or 28 August (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisii vi aut v K.\ Sept.\ a.\ 707 (47)). Atticus’s letter of the twelfth day before the Kalends has arrived, and with it — forwarded — a letter from Cicero’s brother Quintus that has returned the grief Cicero had finally laid down. He will not blame Atticus for sending it, but says he wishes it had not been sent. Quintus’s letter, which the next book of the correspondence will keep revisiting, evidently included an attack on Cicero delivered into Caesar’s camp through young Quintus. The remaining business of 1 is brisk: Atticus is to see to the will, on terms to be settled; Terentia has written about money in the same sense Cicero had already reported, and Cicero will draw on the source Atticus has named if need arises.

Section 2 reports the latest news of Caesar. He will not be at Athens by the Kalends of September; many things hold him in Asia, especially Pharnaces; the twelfth legion, the first that Sulla approached, is said to have driven him off with stones, and the view in camp is that not a legion will be moved. Previously he had been thought to be heading from Patrae straight to Sicily; if so, he must touch at Brundisium, and Cicero would have preferred the other course (here a small crux), since some opportunity of escape would have come with it. As it stands, he must wait, and the foulness of the place must be borne on top of the rest. Section 3 takes up Atticus’s tactical urging — accommodate what you do to the moment — and refuses it on principle: amid his own great faults and the great wrongs done him by his own household, there is nothing he can either do or pretend to do worthy of himself. Atticus’s parallel with Sulla’s day Cicero rejects: those proscriptions were of their kind exceedingly distinguished, only somewhat less tempered in moderation — a sentence that has the dryness of the late letters, and that the apparatus has long puzzled over. The closing lines are characteristic: write often; everyone else is silent; Quintus’s son got everything from Caesar on the spot, and Cicero was not so much as mentioned.