Cicero to Atticus, written from Brundisium on the third day before the Nones of Quintilis 47 BC — 5 July (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi iii Non.\ Quint.\ a.\ 707 (47)). A short, very dark letter in three sections that opens with Atticus having finally confessed, at length, that there is no plan by which he can help. Cicero accepts the verdict without protest. The bleakness of 1 is the bleakest in all of Book 11: nothing has been brought on him by chance (which, he says, would be bearable); everything has been done to himself, by errors and miseries of mind and body which he wishes those nearest him had cared to remedy. He asks Atticus to stop offering counsel or consolation, and merely to keep writing whatever comes to mind — “as long as there is someone to whom to send it; and that will not be long.”

2 is a single Brundisium-room sentence: a rumour, started by a letter of Servius Sulpicius and confirmed by every subsequent messenger, that Caesar has left Alexandria. “Whether it is true or false, since it makes no difference to me, I do not know which I should prefer.” 3 is the longest and the worst, returning to Tullia and the divorce. Cicero is wrecked by the girl’s situation; at the second installment of the dowry, he says, they were blind. He begs Atticus to gather what can be saved from silver and furniture into safekeeping — “for now the end seems to be on us, and there will be no terms of peace, and what we have will perish even without an enemy” — and to find a moment to speak to Terentia about it. The letter closes with the bare admission that he cannot write everything. Two short cruxes in 3 are preserved as \ markers; the sense given is the most natural reading.