Cicero to Atticus, written at the Tusculan villa about 21 June 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano inter xv et xi K. Quint. a. 710 (44), the same window as 15.19, and probably the same day or the day after. This is one of the hardest letters of the year. Cicero has decided to leave Italy under cover of a legation, and the decision has crystallised into bleakness. He has been losing faith in Rome since the day he heard “that tyrant” — Caesar — publicly called “the most illustrious of men”; and when he saw, with Atticus at Lanuvium, that the assassins held only as much hope of remaining alive as Antony chose to grant them, he despaired. Departure now is, he confesses bluntly, an act of despair, not of embassy. He is leaving the lobster-pot not in flight but in the hope of a better death than the one Antony seems to intend. The whole of the blame, he says, is Marcus Brutus’s — for sparing Antony at the Ides, and for handing the state to him in the days that followed.

The letter then moves to logistics. Pompeius the younger has been received at Carteia in Spain: there is again an army against the Caesarian regime. Which camp, then — that one, or Brutus’s and Cassius’s? Antony has crushed any middle position. Cicero asks Atticus’s advice on the practical question (Brundisium or Puteoli for embarkation) and turns to money: a loan of 200,000 sesterces will have to be raised for five months to cover the interval until Quintus’s debts fall in. The final section he writes out in his own hand — a small mark of secrecy and weight. The closing instruction is to write back today.