Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the seventh day before the Ides of Quintilis 47 BC — 9 July (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi vii Id.\ Quint.\ a.\ 707 (47)). Camillus has sent word that he and Atticus have already conferred on the business Cicero entrusted to them, and Cicero was hoping for confirmation from Atticus himself — though he concedes that there is no real altering the situation. The greater anxiety is for Atticus’s health, which his last letter had mentioned. A traveller named Agusius has arrived from Rhodes with intelligence: young Quintus set out for Caesar on 29 May, and Philotimus reached Rhodes the day before with letters for Cicero. Quintus the brother has sent the elder Cicero what reads as triumphant congratulations — on what, Cicero will not say, but the bitterness in the sentence “given how grave my error has been, I cannot in even the most distant thought reach anything I could find bearable” tells the whole story.

The third paragraph is the most painful piece of Book 11: Cicero opens the question of Tullia’s divorce from Dolabella. He blames himself and Atticus for not having acted earlier; “nothing among our miseries would have been better than a divorce.” He runs through the grounds that could have been used — Dolabella’s debt legislation (tabulae novae), the nocturnal break-ins, the affair with Metella, the general inventory of his crimes — and notes that they would not even have lost the dowry had they moved in time. Now Dolabella himself seems to be “giving us notice” (the rumour of a statue to Clodius is the trigger), and Cicero declares his decision, with Atticus’s agreement, that the nuntium remitti — a formal notice of divorce — should be sent. The only open question is timing, relative to the third installment of the dowry the husband may sue to recover. The letter closes with Cicero’s near-desperate offer to travel by night, if necessary, simply to see Atticus.