Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the eighth day before the Ides of Sextilis 47 BC — 6 August (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi viii Id.\ Sext.\ a.\ 707 (47)). A longer, denser letter in five sections, opening on a now-familiar register: Atticus has written, both to Cicero and (in another letter) to Tullia, about Cicero’s state, and Cicero concedes that everything Atticus says is true. The sharpest line in the opening is the bitter generalisation that, after a grievous injury, he is not even permitted to be angry — nor even to grieve — without paying for it. The fault, he says, has been so contracted that “in every condition and under every regime it appears to be heading toward our ruin.”

The middle three sections are confidential household work — so much so that Cicero switches from a secretary to his own hand at the head of 2. He returns to the question of Tullia’s testamentary position: Dolabella, he believes, has not bothered to think about it, but Atticus, since the subject has opened, can warn her to entrust the will to someone out of the war’s reach (Cicero would prefer Atticus himself). Other property must be set aside and concealed against the impending crash. 3 is an inventory of Terentia’s small treacheries: a remittance of ten thousand sesterces where she had promised twelve — “when she has filched so small a sum out of so small a sum, you see clearly what she has done in the great affair.” 4 is the failure of Philotimus, who has been seen at Ephesus pursuing his own litigation and cannot be bothered to send word. Cicero closes 5 with a flat refusal of Atticus’s consolations: he will not adapt his face and voice to the times, because nothing in his life now depends on doing so, and he sees no ground at all for the hopes Atticus is pinning on Caesar’s African campaign. Two short cruxes in 1 and 2 are preserved as \ markers.