Cicero to Atticus, written at Antium on 8 June 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Antiati a. d. vi Id. Iun. a. 710 (44). Cicero has gone to Antium to attend the council Brutus and Cassius have convened on the question of what to do next. Two months after the Ides of March the assassins are stuck: Antony has the consulship and the veterans, the conspirators have praetorships and a country in which they cannot safely appear, and the proposal to send Brutus and Cassius abroad on a grain commission — ostensibly an honour, in fact an exile — is on the table. The council is held in front of the Liberators’ formidable women: Servilia (Brutus’s mother and Caesar’s old mistress), Tertulla (Cassius’s wife, Brutus’s half-sister), and Porcia (Brutus’s wife and Cato’s daughter); the Stoic Favonius is also present. This letter is Cicero’s eye-witness report to Atticus, and one of the most vivid pieces of political reportage in the corpus.

Cicero comes with advice prepared: accept the grain commission, take Asia, stay alive — in Brutus’s survival lies the survival of the commonwealth. Cassius bursts in with the glance of Mars and refuses Sicily; he will go to Achaea instead. Brutus asks whether he might come to Rome; Cicero says no. The recriminations turn on Decimus Brutus and on opportunities missed; when Cicero says what ought to have been done — not only Caesar struck, but the Senate summoned, the people roused, the whole commonwealth taken in hand — Servilia (the tua familiaris, your dear friend, addressed to Atticus the family intimate) cuts him off: nobody has ever said that to me. The Greek line in section 3, from Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis, is what Cicero says to himself on the journey home: what does this journey of yours hither avail you now, prophet? The vessel of state is shattered; he will get away. The Pelopidae — the cursed house of Pelops — are Caesar’s heirs and the conspirators alike. Section 4 brings the news Cicero has been angling for: Dolabella has named him his legatus, an embassy of the most useful kind — five years’ worth of freedom to come and go — though, as Cicero breaks off with a Greek word for ill-omened speech, who knows how much of the five he will have.