Cicero to Atticus, written on 15 April 44 BC at a wayside inn at Sinuessa — Perseus dateline Scr. in Sinuessano xvii K. Mai. a. 710 (44), the body confirming the day and the deversoriolum Sinuessanum. The letter sits on the same day as 14.7 (written that morning at Formiae as Cicero left for Puteoli) and is the second instalment of the day’s correspondence, written on the road. The news is mixed. The pseudo-Marius Herophilus has been put down (de Mario probe) — “well done,” though Cicero spares a line of regret for L. Licinius Crassus’s grandson; Brutus is now finding even Antony acceptable; Cleopatra, the regina who has been in Rome since 46, has fled, and Cicero is unmoved (reginae fuga mihi non molesta est, his famous tart half-sentence on the queen).

The register is fragmentary and rapid — a wayside dispatch built from short clauses and queries, the kind of letter Atticus is meant to skim and answer item by item. A sentence is left hanging at the end: verum tamen—, “and yet—,” a deliberate aposiopesis on Brutus’s safety that the Latin marks with a long dash and that the English preserves. The whole letter sits in the post-Ides ambivalence that runs through the 14th book: things are calming, the Caesarians are not yet united, and the Liberators may yet be able to move in Rome — but Cicero, on the way to Cumae, will not say so without the qualifier.